## Tag: operator theory

### The complex matrix cube problem summer project – summary of results

In the previous post I announced the project that I was going to supervise in the Summer Projects in Mathematics week at the Technion. In this post I wish to share what we did and what we found in that week.

I had the privilege to work with two very bright students who have recently finished their undergraduate studies: Mattya Ben-Efraim (from Bar-Ilan University) and Yuval Yifrach (from the Technion). It is remarkable the amount of stuff they learned for this one week project (the basics of C*-algebras and operator spaces), and that they actually helped settle the question that I raised to them.

I learned a lot of things in this project. First, I learned that my conjecture was false! I also learned and re-learned some programming abilities, and I learned something about the subtleties and limitations of numerical experimentation (I also learned something about how to supervise an undergraduate research project, but that’s besides the point right now).

### The remarkable Hilbert space H^2 (part III – three open problems)

This is the last in the series of three posts on the d–shift space, which accompany/replace the colloquium talk I was supposed to give. The first two parts are available here and here. In this post I will discuss three open problems that I have been thinking about, which are formulated within the setting of $H^2_d$.

### The remarkable Hilbert space H^2 (Part II – multivariable operator theory and model theory)

This post is the second post in the series of posts on the d–shift space, a.k.a. the Drury–Arveson space, a.k.a. $H^2_d$ (see this previous post about the space $H^2$).

### Functional Analysis – Introduction. Part I

I begin by making clear a certain point. Functional analysis is an enormous branch of mathematics, so big that it does not seem appropriate to call it “a branch”, it sometimes looks more like another tree. When I will talk below about functional analysis, I will mean “textbook functional analysis” and not “research functional analysis”. By this I mean that I will only refer to the core of the theory which is several decades old and which is more-or-less agreed to be the essential and basic part of the subject.

The goal of this post is to serve as an introduction to the course “Advanced Analysis, 201.2.5401”, which is a basic graduate course on (textbook) functional analysis. In the lectures I will only have time to give a limited description of the roots of the subject and the motivation will have to be brief. Here I will aim to describe what was the climate in which this tree grew, where are its roots and what are its fruits.

To prepare this introduction I am relying on the following sources. First and foremost, my love of the subject and my point of view on it were strongly shaped by my teachers, and in particular by Boris Paneah (my Master’s thesis advisor) and Baruch Solel (my PhD. thesis advisor). Second, I learned a lot on the subject from the book “Mathematical Thought from Ancient to Modern Times” by M. Kline and from the notes sections of Rudin’s and Reed-Simon’s books “Functional Analysis”.

And a warning to the kids: this is a blog, not a book, and if you really want to learn something go read the books (the books I mentioned have precise references).

### 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.