I have been writing my own lecture notes (based, of course, on an array of well known references and also on some of my notes from my graduate studies) for the course Advanced Analysis. I have decided to do this because, on the one hand, there was no particular text that I wanted to follow, while on the other hand I wanted my students to have a convenient reference for the material in the course. I hope these notes were instructive to some readers of the blog.

During the second half of the course I will follows Arveson’s book “A Short Course on Spectral Theory”, besides some applications and/or examples that I will want to occasionally throw in. So I will post my notes on much rarer occasions.

### Advanced Analysis, Notes 11: Banach spaces (weak topologies, Alaoglu’s theorem)

Let $X$ be the Banach space $C([0,1])$ of continuous functions on the interval $[0,1]$ with the sup norm. Consider the following sequence of functions $\{f_n\}$ defind as follows. $f(0) = 0$ and $f_n(1/(n+1)) = 1$ for all $n = 1, 2, \ldots$,  $f_n$ is equal to zero on the interval between $2/(n+1)$ and $1$, and $f_n$ is linear in the intervals where we haven’t defined it yet (visualize!). The sequence is tending to zero pointwise, but the norm of $X$ does not detect this. The sequence tends to $0$ in the $L^1$ norm, but the $L^1$ norm is not in the game. Can the Banach space structure of $X$ detect the convergence of $f_n$ to $0$? Read the rest of this entry »

### Advanced Analysis, Notes 10: Banach spaces (application: divergence of Fourier series)

Recall Theorem 6 from Notes 3:

Theorem 6: For every $f \in C_{per}([0,1]) \cap C^1([0,1])$, the Fourier series of $f$ converges uniformly to $f$

It is natural to ask how much can we weaken the assumptions of the theorem and still have uniform convergence, or how much can we weaken and still have pointwise convergence. Does the Fourier series of a continuous (and periodic) function always converge? In this post we will use the principle of uniform boundedness to see that the answer to this question is a very big NO.

Once again, we begin with some analytical preparations.  Read the rest of this entry »

### Advanced Analysis, Notes 9: Banach spaces (the three big theorems)

Until now we had not yet seen a theorem about Banach spaces — the Hahn–Banach theorems did not require the space to be complete. In this post we learn the three big theorems about operators on Banach spaces: the principle of uniform boundedness, the open mapping theorem, and the closed graph theorem. It is common that these three theorems are presented in texts on functional analysis under the heading “consequences of the Baire category theorem“.  Read the rest of this entry »

### Advanced Analysis, Notes 8: Banach spaces (application: weak solutions to PDEs)

Today I will show you an application of the Hahn-Banach Theorem to partial differential equations (PDEs). I learned this application in a seminar in functional analysis, run by Haim Brezis, that I was fortunate to attend in the spring of 2008 at the Technion.

As often happens with serious applications of functional analysis, there is some preparatory material to go over, namely, weak solutions to PDEs.