Real and functional analysis (Q5918116)

I think that this is an excellent book. In the authors' words (see Preface), it ``aims at giving a modern exposition of all the material from functional analysis traditionally presented in a one-year or one-and-a-half year course (including real analysis) and necessary for the study of partial differential equations, mathematical physics, optimal control, and the theory of stochastic processes.'' It is stated in its back cover that it ``is intended for graduate and PhD students studying real and functional analysis as well as mathematicians and physicist whose research is related to functional analysis''. I think that the book indeed meets its objectives and that all people in the categories just mentioned should take a look at it to find out first hand what this book can offer them. I am sure that most of them would take a good profit from it. The book is almost 600 pages long and very comprehensive, with many interesting examples. Its style and notation make it very readable. In it you can find a simple and clear exposition of the fundamentals of most, if not all, topics of real and functional analysis. Also, references are given where you can go deeper and deeper into any of them. To get an idea of the content of the book, let me give the list of the titles of each of its twelve chapters, where I have included in brackets the first and last page of each chapter: 1. Metric and topological spaces (1--46), 2. Fundamentals of measure theory (47--82), 3. The Lebesgue integral (83--132), 4. Connections between the Integral and Derivative (133--158), 5. Normed and Euclidean spaces (159--186), 6. Linear operators and functionals (187--278), 7. Spectral theory (279--356), 8. Locally convex spaces and distributions (357--396), 9. The Fourier transform and Sobolev spaces (397--432), 10. Unbounded operators and operator semigroups (433--482), 11. Banach algebras (483--510), 12. Infinite-dimensional analysis (511--540). Each of the twelve chapters ends with a section called ``Complements and exercises''. These ``Complements'' form a very important and interesting part of the book. Reading them I cannot help remind the ``Notes and remarks'' of Dunford-Schwartz's treatise, although they do not play exactly the same role. As the name suggests, they take the reader beyond the basics. They contain a lot of results, with or without proofs, history and comments. They are divided into subsections, each of them with its own title. The length of these subsections varies from less than one page to, in some exceptional case, a little bit more than ten. Among these titles one finds, for instance: ``Convergence of Fourier series'', ``Weak compactness in Banach spaces'', ``Invariant subspaces'', ``A mathematical model of quantum mechanics'', and many more. The book contains a large number of exercises, of variable difficulty and with different goals. Some of them are marked with signs whose meaning is explained in the Preface and some of them are accompanied by hints, which sometimes are just references to books or papers. At the end of the book, after the last chapter (the 12th) and before the References and Index, one finds a few pages of ``Comments''. They deal mainly with the References but they begin with an interesting and very short survey of the history of functional analysis. Then the authors very briefly comment or at least classify many of the 661 books and 51 papers they provide in the References. I have found very few typos and small mistakes, and no ``big'' mistakes, of course. A curious thing. You find the name of a European town written in two different ways on the very same page (p. 542). I don't know the reason, and I don't know whether this is intended or not. Maybe this led some readers to reflect on the hazardous history of Europe in the last century. A minor remark. I would have appreciated many more names and terms in the Index at the end of the book. Of course, when one uses the electronic version of a book, this is not so important, but even in this case, a look at the alphabetical index always gives you an idea of what you can find in it. Let me mention just a few examples of terms and names which, in my opinion, would have been welcome in the Index: Caley (sic), Caley (sic) transform, Dunford, embedded, Eberlein, Eberlein-Shmulian (sic) theorem, invariant subspace, nuclear, singular integral, singular kernel, trace, Weyl\dots. In short, I believe that the book is clear, dense, concise and very well done. The older I get, the more appreciate ``a ready, concise, clear explanation'' and I have found the book plenty of them.