### Advanced Analysis, Notes 12: Banach spaces (application: existence of Haar measure)

This post is dedicated to my number one follower for her fourteenth birthday,which I spoiled…

Let $G$ be a compact abelian group. By this we mean that $G$ is at once both an abelian group and a compact Hausdorff topological space, and that the group operations are continuous, meaning that $g \mapsto g^{-1}$ is continuous on $G$ and $(g,h) \mapsto g+h$ is continuous as a map from $G \times G$ to $G$. It is known that there exists a regular Borel measure $\mu$ on $G$, called the Haar measure, which is non-negative, satisfies $\mu(G) = 1$, and is translation invariant:

$\forall g \in G . \mu(g+ E) = \mu(E) ,$

for every Borel set $E \subseteq G$. In fact, the Haar measure is known to exist in greater generality ($G$ does not have to be commutative and if one allows $\mu$ to be infinite then $G$ can also be merely locally compact). The Haar measure is an indispensable tool in representation theory and in ergodic theory. In this post we will use the weak* compactness of the unit ball of the dual to give a slick proof of the existence of the Haar measure in the abelian compact case.