scientific article; zbMATH DE number 1058620

Publication date 8 September 1997

Introductory exposition (textbooks, tutorial papers, etc.) pertaining to ordinary differential equations (34-01) Introductory exposition (textbooks, tutorial papers, etc.) pertaining to partial differential equations (35-01) Introductory exposition (textbooks, tutorial papers, etc.) pertaining to functional analysis (46-01) Introductory exposition (textbooks, tutorial papers, etc.) pertaining to operator theory (47-01) Ergodic theory of linear operators (47A35) (Semi-) Fredholm operators; index theories (47A53) Hermitian and normal operators (spectral measures, functional calculus, etc.) (47B15) Linear symmetric and selfadjoint operators (unbounded) (47B25) General theory of ordinary differential operators (47E05) General theory of partial differential operators (47F05) Pseudodifferential operators (47G30)

Review text

This is a new book which is not comparable to any of the existing textbooks on functional analysis and operator theory available on a vast market. It consists of six chapters of nearly equal size. In the first chapter, the author collects basic facts from the theory of Banach spaces and bounded linear operators between them, including Hilbert spaces and their geometry, bounded and compact operators on Hilbert spaces, and applications to Sturm-Liouville problems and elliptic boundary value and eigenvalue problems. The second chapter is concerned with the Baire category theorem and its consequences, the Hahn-Banach theorem, duality and weak topologies, and topological vector spaces. The general spectral theory of bounded linear operators is dealt with in the third chapter, with a particular emphasis on spectral properties of selfadjoint and unitary operators. In the fourth chapter, the author gives a thorough account of compact operators, Fredholm operators, and index theory. In view of applications in quantum mechanics, unbounded linear operators are even more important. This is the topic of the fifth chapter, including applications to ordinary differential operators. Finally, the sixth chapter is devoted to partial differential operators and pseudo-differential operators, especially classical examples of such operators in Euclidean space. From this brief table of contents it is already clear that this book is not one of the usual textbooks on functional analysis, but is characterized by a non-standard choice of the material covered. This makes the book both particularly interesting and valuable: the author never presents the functional-analytic approach to an analytic problem in an abstract ``l'art-pour-l'art fashion, but always as application-oriented tool which is needed for solving a specific problem. This refers, in particular, to the last chapter: the reviewer does not know of any other book which provides such a careful preparation of the functional-analytic background of the theory of pseudo-differential operators, a field of still growing importance which illustrates the fascinating ``interaction between analysis, geometry, and mathematical physics. The book is very carefully written and understandable throughout. The reviewer highly appreciated the numerous nontrivial exercises at the end of each subsection, as well as the historical remarks which illustrate the development of different concepts ``wie es eigentlich gewesen. The book closes with a list of references, a list of symbols, a name index, and a subject index. As stated above, this book is unique in contents and style, and it should be useful not only to specialists in functional analysis, operator theory, differential equations, and geometry, but also to students who want to get an idea of the most fascinating fields of mathematical analysis. The reviewer does hope that the book will be soon translated into English in order to make it accessible to a larger readership.

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