No label defined (Q4040668)

The book is meant as a comprehensive course on functional analysis and operator theory, and is addressed to University students with no or little theoretical background. It consists of three parts of nearly equal size. The first part (Chapters 1-5) gives a detailed self-contained account of the basic notions and facts of measure and integration theory (measurable sets and functions; Riemann and Lebesgue integral; theorems of Lebesgue, Levi, Fubini and Radon-Nikodým). In the second part (Chapters 6-10), the authors treat the usual topics covered by most textbooks on functional analysis (Banach and Hilbert spaces; linear functionals; bounded and compact linear operators; spectral theory of compact self-adjoint operators). The somewhat isolated Chapter 11 is concerned with distributions, operations between them, and their Fourier transform. The third part (Chapters 12-16) deals with the spectral theory of general self-adjoint operators (both bounded and unbounded) and, in particular, expansions with respect to generalized eigenfunctions. While such expansions are standard for common ordinary differential operators, the authors treat also partial differential operators in the last chapter. This is certainly beyond the scope of most textbooks on operator theory, and is probably motivated by the numerous own contributions of the first author and his Kiev school in this field [see, e.g., the first author's classical monograph in the series Naukova Dumka (1965; Zbl 0142.37203)]. The authors provide a hugh amount of results which are throughout illustrated by lots of interesting exercises (often pointing at applications in mathematical physics). It is evident that no course on functional analysis can cover all the material presented here on 600 pags. Nevertheless, a good orientation is possible by the fact that each chapter starts with a concise summary of its contents. Two minor drawbacks, however, should be mentioned. First, the authors make extensive use of logical symbols and quantifiers in the text, which easily could be replaced by a grammatically simple phrase in most cases. Second, for some reason which is perhaps due to typographical necessities (lack of paper in the Soviet Union?), the last three chapters are printed entirely in ``petit'' characters (as normally used for footnotes); this makes it quite hard to read them. Apart from these flaws, the book is clearly written and carefully edited.