The mathematical work of Susanne Dierolf (Q2430132)

This paper presents a selection of results and methods in functional analysis contributed by Susanne Dierolf. It has been written by two of her most distinguished PhD students, who know her work very well. Sadly enough, Susanne Dierolf passed away in April 2009 at the early age of 66 years. She was a great mathematician and a very strong person, who was the advisor of 10 PhD students. The reviewer had the pleasure of working with her for many years, profited and learnt much from her highly original, creative and accurate way of doing mathematics, and considers a privilege to have been a friend of hers. The main area of S. Dierolf's mathematical work was the theory of locally convex topological vector spaces, with an emphasis on Fréchet and (DF)-spaces. She solved several open problems of Grothendieck that had been open since the mid-1950s. Most of the answers to these questions (and many others from other mathematicians) were obtained by counterexamples. However, these counterexamples quite often were very clever existence theorems, which triggered further research finishing in applicable positive results. The authors of this excellent, informative survey concentrate on the topics mentioned above and neglect S. Dierolf's contributions to other areas of mathematics, like general topology or topological groups. Her work on topological groups culminated in the monograph [``Uniform structures on topological groups and their quotients'', McGraw Hill, New York (1981; Zbl 0489.22001)], with her PhD thesis advisor \textit{W.\ Roelcke}. Here are some of the most important contributions of Susanne Dierolf singled out by the authors: (1) Her work on incomplete quotients; she proved in 1975 that every locally convex space is the quotient of a complete locally convex space all of whose bounded sets are finite-dimensional. (2) Her counterexamples and many positive results on the three-space problem obtained in her PhD thesis in 1974 and published jointly with Roelcke in 1981. She showed, for example, that there is a non (DF)-space \(E\) that contains a closed subspace \(F\) such that \(E/F\) and \(F\) are (DF)-spaces. (3) In 1993, Susanne and I proved that a quotient map between Fréchet spaces lifts bounded sets if and only if it lifts bounded sets with closure; a quite surprising result when it was obtained that turned out to be useful in the study of the dual of exact sequences of Fréchet spaces by Meise and Vogt later. (4) In 1991, in a joint article with C.\ Fernández, we showed that the bidual of a distinguished Fréchet space need not be distinguished, thus solving an open problem of Grothendieck. (5) In 1981, she proved that the natural bidual of a (DF)-space is also a (DF)-space and, in her Habilitation published in 1985, she gave examples of barrelled (DF)-spaces \(F\) such that \(L_b(\ell_1,F)\) is not barrelled. These questions are related to the problem of topologies of Grothendieck that was solved in 1986 by Taskinen, and her results were very influential in the joint work of K. D.\ Bierstedt and the reviewer on the (dual) density conditions in the late 1980's. (6) S. Dierolf made important contributions on inductive limits, in particular on (LB) and (LF)-spaces. For example, in 1988, we solved another problem of Grothendieck by constructing strict (LF)-spaces whose bidual is not an (LF)-space, even if the step spaces are distinguished Fréchet spaces. These examples were complemented by nice positive results obtained in 2002 in joint work with the second author of this article. Moreover, in several papers with Domański, she obtained very deep results on the still open problem asking whether every regular (LB)-space is complete. (7) Between 1997 and 2008, Susanne contributed several clarifying ideas and results to the theory of topological algebras in joint work with Schroeder, Wengenroth, Heintz, Khin Aye Aye and Kuss. (8) In 2005, S. Dierolf disproved a longstanding conjecture of V.A. Raikov by giving an example of a semiabelian and not quasiabelian category. Another example was given later by Rump in 2008. As the authors point out, Susanne was also a very good, very clear and very motivating teacher, who loved mathematics. All her friends and collaborators miss her very much.