## Tag: operator algebras

### Major advances in the operator amenability problem

Laurent Marcoux and Alexey Popov recently published a preprint, whose title speaks for itself :”Abelian, amenable operator algebras are similar to C*-algebras“. This complements another recent contribution, by Yemon Choi, Ilijas Farah and Narutaka Ozawa, “A nonseparable amenable operator algebra which is not isomorphic to a C*-algebra“.

The open problem that these two papers address is whether every amenable Banach algebra, which is a subalgebra of $B(H)$, is similar to a (nuclear) C*-algebra. As the titles clearly indicate (good titling!), we now know that an abelian amenable operator algebra is similar to a C*-algebra, and on the other hand, that a non-separable, non-abelian operator algebra is not necessarily similar to a C*-algebra.

I recommend reading the introduction to the Marcoux-Popov paper (which is very friendly to non-experts too) to get a picture of this problem, its history, and an outline of the solution.

### Arveson memorial article

Palle Jorgensen and Daniel Markiewicz have put together a beautiful tribute to the late Bill Arveson, with contributions from about a dozen mathematicians as well as a more personal piece by Lee Ann Kaskutas. This memorial article might appear later elsewhere in shorter form, but I think it would be interesting for many people to see the full tribute, with all the various points of view and pieces of life that it contains. I wrote a post dedicated to Arveson’s memory about half a year ago, where I put links to two recent surveys (1 by Davidson and and 2 by Izumi), and in about a month there will be a big conference in Berkeley dedicated to Arveson’s legacy; still I feel that this tribute really fills a hole, and conveys in broader, fuller way what a remarkable mathematician he was, and how impacted so many so strongly. Please share the link with people who might be interested.

### Course announcement : Advanced Analysis, 20125401

In the first term of the 2012/2013, I will be giving the course “Advanced Analysis” here at BGU. This is the department’s core functional analysis course for graduate students, though ambitious undergraduate students are also encouraged to take this course, and some of them indeed do. The price to pay is that we do not assume that the students know any functional analysis, and the only formal requisites are a course  in complex variables and a course in (point set) topology, as well as a course in measure theory which can be taken concurrently. The price to pay for having no requisites in functional analysis, while still aiming at graduate level course, is that the course is huge: we have five hours of lectures a week. In practice we will actually have six hours of lectures a week, because I will go abroad in the middle of the semester to this conference and workshop in Bangalore. The official syllabus of the course is as follows:

Banach spaces and Hilbert spaces. Basic properties of Hilbert spaces. Topological vector spaces. Banach-Steinhaus theorem; open mapping theorem and closed graph theorem. Hahn-Banach theorem. Duality. Measures on locally compact spaces; the dual of C(X). Weak and weak-* topologies; Banach-Alaoglu theorem. Convexity and the Krein-Milman theorem. The Stone-Weierstrass theorem. Banach algebras. Spectrum of a Banach algebra element. Gelfand theory of commutative Banach algebras. The spectral theorem for normal operators (in the continuous functional calculus form).

I plan to cover all these topics (with all that is implicitly implied), but I will probably give the whole course a little bend towards my own area of expertise, especially in the exercises and examples. We do have to wait and see who the students are and what their background is before deciding precisely how to proceed. Some notes for the course will appear (in the English language) on this blog. The official course webpage (which is in Hebrew) is behind this link.