Around and under my talk at Fields

This week I am attending a Workshop on Developments and Technical Aspects of Free Noncommutative Functions at the Fields Institute in Toronto. Since I plan to give a chalk-talk, I cannot post my slides online (and I cannot prepare for my talk by preparing slides), so I will write here what some ideas around what I want to say in my talk, and also some ramblings I won’t have time to say in my talk.

[Several years ago I went to a conference in China and came back with the insight that in international conferences I should give a computer presentation and not a blackboard talk, because then people who cannot understand my accent can at least read the slides. It’s been almost six years since then and indeed I gave only beamer-talks since. My English has not improved over this period, I think, but I have several reasons for allowing myself to give an old fashioned lecture – the main ones are the nature of the workshop, the nature of the audience and the kind of things I have to say]. 

In the workshop Guy Salomon, Eli Shamovich and I will give a series of talks on our two papers (one and two). These two papers have a lot of small auxiliary results, which in usual conference talk we don’t get the chance to speak about. This workshop is a wonderful opportunity for us to highlight some of these results and the ideas behind them, which we feel might be somewhat buried in our paper and have gone unnoticed. 

Algebras of bounded noncommutative analytic functions on subvarieties of the noncommutative unit ball

Guy Salomon, Eli Shamovich and I recently uploaded to the arxiv our paper “Algebras of bounded noncommutative analytic functions on subvarieties of the noncommutative unit ball“. This paper blends in with the current growing interest in noncommutative function theory, continues and unifies several strands of my past research.

A couple of years ago, after being inspired by lectures of Agler, Ball, McCarthy and  Vinnikov on the subject, and after years of being influenced by Paul Muhly and Baruch Solel’s work, I realized that many of my different research projects (subproduct systems, the isomorphism problem, space of Dirichlet series with the complete Pick property, operator algebras associated with monomial ideals) are connected by the unifying theme of bounded analytic nc functions on subvarieties of the nc ball. “Realized” is a strong word, because many of my original ideas on this turned out to be false, and others I still don’t know how to prove. Anyway, it took me a couple of years and a lot of help, and here is this paper.

In short, we study algebras of bounded analytic functions on subvarieties of the the noncommutative (nc) unit ball :

tuples of matrices,

as well as bounded analytic functions that extend continuously to the “boundary”. We show that these algebras are multiplier algebras of appropriate nc reproducing kernel Hilbert spaces, and are completely isometrically isomorphic to the quotient of (the bounded nc analytic functions in the ball) by the ideal of nc functions vanishing on the variety. We classify these algebras in terms of the varieties, similar to classification results in the commutative case. We also identify previously studied algebras (such as multiplier algebras of complete Pick spaces and tensor algebras of subproduct systems) as algebras of bounded analytic functions on nc varieties. See the introduction for more.

We certainly plan to continue this line of research in the near future – in particular, the passage to other domains (beyond the ball), and the study of algebraic/bounded isomorphisms.