A first course in harmonic analysis (Q5915474)

The book is a primer in harmonic analysis at the undergraduate level. The author's aim is to present the main concepts and ideas of harmonic analysis and to avoid as much of the technical background as possible. Therefore, he uses the Riemannian integral instead of Lebesgue theory and metric spaces as a topological framework. The first part of the book deals with classical Fourier analysis on the unit circle and on the real line. The presentation is concentrated on the Plancherel theorem for both Fourier series and Fourier transforms on the real line. Convolution of functions and orthonormal bases are other concepts described in this part. Uniform convergence of Fourier series is discussed shortly but no chapter is devoted to pointwise and a.e. convergence. The inversion formula and the Poisson summation formula for Fourier transforms are proved, but the Riemann-Lebesgue lemma is not presented. The second part of the book is devoted to harmonic analysis on locally compact abelian (LCA) groups. The simplest situation of finite abelian groups is presented in the first chapter of this part. Then the author introduces metrizable LCA groups, their characters, and related Fourier transforms. The concepts of dual group and Haar integral are also introduced here. The main results presented here are: the Pontryagin duality theorem, the Plancherel theorem and the theorem of the existence and uniqueness of Haar measure. However, the proof of the first theorem is not given, while the proof of the second one is given only for discrete groups. The proof of the last theorem is presented in an appendix. According to the author's words the last part ``is intended to provide the reader with a first impression of the world of noncommutative harmonic analysis''. The concepts of unitary representations and irreducibility are presented. In the framework of matrix groups the ideas of Lie algebra and exponential mapping are described. The main theorem presented here is the Peter-Weyl theorem. Exercises can be found in any chapter. The book gives a good feeling of what harmonic analysis is like. The only important subject, that is hardly touched, is the connection of harmonic analysis with differential operators and the so-called real-variable methods.