No label defined (Q4037140)

[For the entire collection see Zbl 0755.00016.] This is a research expository paper. Its purpose is to describe a method for studying the Szegő projection in planar domains based on the Kerzman-Stein theorem (which states roughly that the Cauchy transform is nearly selfadjoint in smooth planar domains and that the Szegő projection is nearly equal to the Cauchy transform). The method gives rise to a concrete description of the Szegő projection in terms of elementary functions and operators. This description is used to solve the classical Dirichlet problem on planar domains by means of explicit formulas which can be understood in very concrete terms. These ideas are also used to give an elementary proof of the existence of the Ahlfors map of a multiply connected planar domain. Another goal of this paper is to demonstrate that the Kerzman-Stein theorem can be proved with a minimum of machinery, and that once this has been done, it is possible to solve the Dirichlet problem ``from scratch'' in a small number of pages using only elementary analysis. The paper was written so as to be comprehensible to a first year graduate student in mathematics. The results described in this paper from a theoretical perspective give rise to practical methods for explicitly computing the objects under study which should be of interest to numerical analysts. The theme of this paper is elaborated further in the author's book [The Cauchy transform, potential theory, and conformal mapping, CRC Press, Boca Raton (1992)].