The History of Analysis Seminar took place in the Fall of 1996, 1997, and 1998, at the Math Department of UC Berkeley. It featured weekly talks by professors, post-docs, and students. The seminar was organized by Alex Gottlieb, Tom Hadfield, and Henry Helson.
No one doubts that Cartan made important contributions to mathematics, but few modern sources accurately gauge his widespread influence. Along with a biographical sketch, we'll present a laundry list of (now ubiquitous) concepts due originally to Cartan and a few Fundamental Theorems to go with them.
Disclaimer: The speaker is not a historian, merely a fierce admirer of Cartan.
Bourbaki was born out of the piteous state of French mathematics in the mid-Thirties. He set himself a very ambitious task, namely to write a treatise giving , in its first part, a solid foundation to the rest of the treatise and even to most of modern mathematics.
For reasons of clarity and economy of space, this forced a certain "abstract style, the intent of which has been wildly misunderstood.
Besides recounting some anecdotes about Bourbaki, I shall venture an opinion about his success or lack of it and try to refute the attack by Arnold that Bourbaki is responsible for the Chernobyl disaster.
I will give an account of Connes' development of noncommutative geometry as I saw it happen.
Boltzmann's Equation and H-Theorem. The Critique of Irreversibility. Brownian Motion. Master Equations. The BBGKY Hierarchy. Irreversibility and Information. Theorems about the Increase of Entropy.
Come and find out lots of juicy facts about the history of compactness. What were some of the motivating problems that inspired the definition? Why was the term "compact" chosen and who chose it? What's the difference between compact, sequentially compact, countably compact, quasi-compact, relatively compact, and pseudocompact? Who really contributed to the development of the notion and who just happened to produce the right result at the right time? What's the difference between nets and filters anyway-- and what do either have to do with compactness? How is compactness used in logic? in algebraic geometry?
I'll try to outline the development of K-theory from roughly 1960 to 1985 -- especially with regard to operator algebras.
The canonical anticommutation relations and their real cousins, Clifford algebras, have occupied a central position in differential geometry, group representations, and quantum physics. In this talk I want to emphasize their role in operator theory. In the mid-seventies, Joe Taylor initiated a very original approach to defining the joint spectrum of a commuting n-tuple of operators. The Taylor spectrum consists of all points in complex n-space for which the homology of a certain complex is nontrivial. It is now understood to be the "correct" spectrum for multivariable operator theory.
I'll discuss the basic properties of the anticommutation relations in finite dimensions (starting at the beginning) and bring out their role in the construction of the Taylor spectrum.
I will pick up the story in 1939, a turning point in the development of unitary representation theory, when the first systematic advances were made in dealing with unitary representations of groups that were neither abelian nor compact. I will briefly discuss the pre-1939 background and then follow the development of several important themes as they evolve over several decades following 1939.
Perhaps the greatest mathematician of our century, this amazing man's penetrating mind helped shape our current world in many profound ways. We will look at some of the highlights of his work in set theory, lattice theory, economics, ergodic theory, and of course what he viewed as his greatest achievement --- the development of operator algebras.
In the early days of Banach algebra theory an abstract object emerged --- the B*-algebra. The obvious example was a closed, adjoint-closed subalgebra of the bounded operators on a Hilbert space (called a C*-algebra). Gelfand and Naimark in 1943 proved that every B*-algebra is a C*-algebra, but they needed an extra axiom. This talk is about the fight to get rid of that axiom and the pretty math that was needed.
The talk offers an eagle's eye view of the articles on analysis that the speaker has dared to inflict on the mathematical public during the last hundred years. It consists of something like ten little "lecturettes" about (1) gambling systems, (2) isomorphisms of measure spaces, (3) ergodic transformations, (4) subnormal operators, (5) commutators, (6) unilateral shifts, (7) invariant subspaces, (8) quasi-triangular operators, (9) perturbations of diagonal operators, and (10) positive approximation.
This talk will give a survey of the history of analytic number theory, with its primary emphasis on the prime number theorem, which shows that the number of primes less than n is asymptotic to n/log(n).
Noncommutative, or quantum, probability is a generalization of the classical probability theory whose objects are (possibly noncommutative) algebras of random variables/ observables and functionals on them, rather than probability spaces with measures. I will briefly indicate the origins of this approach in Quantum Mechanics. Then I'll give the definitions, and a number of examples. A more recent sub-theory of Noncommutative Probability, different but surprisingly parallel to the classical case, is Free Probability Theory. I'll give the very basic definitions from it. I'll finish by formulating Wigner's theorem on the convergence of random matrices to the semicircular distribution.
I'll indicate how Wigner's theorem is a consequence of the Free Central Limit Theorem, and prove it by simple diagrammatical techninques.
A quick survey starting from the mid-nineteenth century to the present.
Shizuo Kakutani is a great analyst of the 20th Century. He has done fundamental work in Banach spaces, ergodic theory, fixed-point theory, Brownian motion, measure theory, and other subjects. I will survey Kakutani's work, concentrating mainly on his surprising theorems about Brownian motion. I will also prove at least one of his theorems, probably the one about "equivalence of infinite probability measures."
The symmetric-decreasing rearrangement of a function (in R^n) possesses two useful properties, namely it is symmetric and it decreases as a function of distance from the origin. Using little more than Fubini's Theorem and a little ingenuity, I plan to show how taking rearrangements yields useful inequalities in several familiar integral expressions. My primary focus will be a 1930 theorem of Riesz which appears, among other places, in a 1983 proof of some sharp constants for the Hardy-Littlewood-Sobolev inequality.
I will tell my own version of the history of what is known as the Radon inversion problem: reconstructing a function in R from its integrals along all (n-1) dimensional affine subspaces. I will make an effort to see how this problem has arisen in many different setups and how some modern biomedical imaging problems lead to radically more complex (nonlinear) and yet unsolved versions of this type of inversion problem.
A compact set K in the complex plane is said to be removable for bounded holomorphic functions, if for any open set U containing K, any bounded holomorphic function in U minus K continues to a function holomorphic in U.
Which K are removable? A characterization for all sets of finite one-dimensional Hausdorff measure was completed in 1977 by G David. The solution relies on diverse tools developed by many mathematicians over a long period, including potential theory, Calderon-Zygmund singular integrals, geometric measure theory, a version of the travelling salesman problem, Menger's notion of cuvature, and a magic identity. In this talk I will outline the main ideas and techniques.
Many problems in geometry involve the global solution of a system of partial differential equations that may be highly undetermined locally, but for which there may be highly nontrivial obstructions to choosing local solutions appropriately so that they patch together: problems like that of immersing one manifold in another, or finding an isometric map near a distance-decreasing one, or of finding a certain geometric structure on a manifold --- a foliation, or a contact structure , or a symplectic structure. Often there is a preliminary topological obstruction to finding a solution, but once this is overcome, the analytic provlems can be dealt with. Equations with this property are said to satisfy the h-principle, and their examples are very numerous. We will give a number of historically famous examples and probably say nothing at all about the proofs.
In the theory of von Neumann algebras, the main building blocks are those with trivial centers, called factors. Among them, the ones which were the last to be understood were those of type III. I'll give a survey of their theory and try to describe what they look like and who did what and when.
The thesis of Pierre Fatou, published in 1906, was a path breaking work in which the new theory of Lebesgue integration was used to study harmonic and holomorphic functions in the unit disk. While Fatou may be better known nowadays for his later work on iteration, his thesis had a comparably large impact. This talk will describe the contents of the thesis, discuss some of the developments that ensued, and relay what I have been able to learn about Fatou himself.
In this talk I will outline some ideas behind the development of the notion of "quantum groups" and some recent and less recent results in this direction.