Functional Analysis

Rating:
Summary: Modern topics in math.
Review: "Modern analysis" used to be a popular name for the subject of this lovely book. It is as important as ever, but perhaps less "modern". The subject of functional analysis, while fundamental and central in the landscape of mathematics, really started with seminal theorems due to Banach, Hilbert, von Neumann, Herglotz, Hausdorff, Friedrichs, Steinhouse,...and many other of, the perhaps less well known, founding fathers, in Central Europe (at the time), in the period between the two World Wars. In the beginning it generated awe in its ability
to provide elegant proofs of classical theorems that otherwise were thought to be both technical and difficult. The beautiful idea that makes it all clear as daylight: Wiener's theorem on absolutely convergent(AC) Fourier series of 1/f if you can divide, and if f has the AC Fourier series, is a case in point. The new subject gained from there because of its many sucess stories,- in proving new theorems, in unifying old ones, in offering a framework for quantum theory, for dynamical systems, and for partial differential equations. And offering a language that facilitated interdisiplinary work in science! The Journal of Functional Analysis, starting in the 1960ties, broadened the subject, reaching almost all branches of science, and finding functional analytic flavor in theories surprisingly far from the original roots of the subject. The topics in Rudin's book are inspired by harmonic analysis. The later part offers one of the most elegant compact treatment of the theory of operators in Hilbert space, I can think of. Its approach to unbounded operators is lovely.

Rating:
Summary: Modern topics in math.
Review: "Modern analysis" used to be a popular name for the subject of this lovely book. It is as important as ever, but perhaps less "modern". The subject of functional analysis, while fundamental and central in the landscape of mathematics, really started with seminal theorems due to Banach, Hilbert, von Neumann, Herglotz, Hausdorff, Friedrichs, Steinhouse,...and many other of, the perhaps less well known, founding fathers, in Central Europe (at the time), in the period between the two World Wars. In the beginning it generated awe in its ability
to provide elegant proofs of classical theorems that otherwise were thought to be both technical and difficult. The beautiful idea that makes it all clear as daylight: Wiener's theorem on absolutely convergent(AC) Fourier series of 1/f if you can divide, and if f has the AC Fourier series, is a case in point. The new subject gained from there because of its many sucess stories,- in proving new theorems, in unifying old ones, in offering a framework for quantum theory, for dynamical systems, and for partial differential equations. And offering a language that facilitated interdisiplinary work in science! The Journal of Functional Analysis, starting in the 1960ties, broadened the subject, reaching almost all branches of science, and finding functional analytic flavor in theories surprisingly far from the original roots of the subject. The topics in Rudin's book are inspired by harmonic analysis. The later part offers one of the most elegant compact treatment of the theory of operators in Hilbert space, I can think of. Its approach to unbounded operators is lovely.

Rating:
Summary: Uno de los mejores en Análisis Funcional
Review: De los excelentes textos en Análisis Funcional que existen en el mercado, éste es de los mejores. Tiene una excelente presentación de la Teoría de Distribuciones, en los capítulos 6, 7 y 8. La teoría espectral como se trata aca es magnifica. Tambien tiene un desarrollo muy completo sobre espacios vectoriales topológicos. Termina con una reseña bibliográfica muy completa.

Rating:
Summary: Uno de los mejores en Análisis Funcional
Review: De los excelentes textos en Análisis Funcional que existen en el mercado, éste es de los mejores. Tiene una excelente presentación de la Teoría de Distribuciones, en los capítulos 6, 7 y 8. La teoría espectral como se trata aca es magnifica. Tambien tiene un desarrollo muy completo sobre espacios vectoriales topológicos. Termina con una reseña bibliográfica muy completa.

Rating:
Summary: Decent book, if you can get it cheap
Review: I strongly urge any serious math student to own a copy of both Rudin's Principles ("Baby Rudin") and his Real and Complex Analysis ("Adult Rudin"). The former is absolutely essential- without completely mastering continuity and convergence on the basic metric space topology on R^n, higher math is going to be quite a pain. The second is good because it puts the major ideas of basic analysis- Radon measures, L^p spaces, rudiments of Hilbert and Banach Spaces, differentiation and integration, Fourier and Harmonic Analysis, Holomorphic and meromorphic functions, etc. all in one nice volume, although the problems may be too challenging or tangential to master the material by doing them.

With that said, I don't like this book as much. Perhaps because the problems don't provide great movitation for the theorems- in any event, I would recommend using at least two books to understand functional analysis. One that emphasizes a rigorous approach to the theory involved, and another more applied book that allows you to play with the new tools to solve the problems functional analysis was invented to solve; quantum mechanics, for example.

Reed and Simon is a good book, although I'm sure physicists or physics students would probably complain about it for the same reason I like it- its very mathematically rigorous and has a ton of problems- 30 to 60 on average at the end of each chapter, with only a few digressions into applications into quantum physics or elementary QFT. Get this with some Springer text, like Elements of Functional Analysis.

One more note- Rudin's book is broken up into three parts- one on TVS (Topological vector spaces) that combines topological properties of a space (for example, local convexity or local compactness) with the usual vector-space operations to set the spaces where operators act.

The second section deals with distributions- I regret that one failure of "Adult Rudin" was to emphasize the abstract integral as a linear functional, because this would have helped to make the concept of a distribution more clear.

While the introduction to distributions and their connections to Fourier analysis and differential equations is nice, the text gets bogged down with proofs about convolutions that are highly technical (and make either good practice or a good time for Rudin to actually use, for once, "The details are left to the reader...").

Finally, Rudin introduces operator theory, although it could go much more smoothly- the proofs come off as way too technical, a far cry from the "slickness" his proofs are often accused of being in the graduate analysis text.

All in all, there's some interesting problems to do, but you're not going to understand the applications of Functional Analysis to quantum mechanics or PDE (other than distributions a little), where other, more applied (read: easier) books may give nice problems about applications of Hilbert space methods, such as variational techniques or Fredholm theory.

Rating:
Summary: Decent book, if you can get it cheap
Review: I strongly urge any serious math student to own a copy of both Rudin's Principles ("Baby Rudin") and his Real and Complex Analysis ("Adult Rudin"). The former is absolutely essential- without completely mastering continuity and convergence on the basic metric space topology on R^n, higher math is going to be quite a pain. The second is good because it puts the major ideas of basic analysis- Radon measures, L^p spaces, rudiments of Hilbert and Banach Spaces, differentiation and integration, Fourier and Harmonic Analysis, Holomorphic and meromorphic functions, etc. all in one nice volume, although the problems may be too challenging or tangential to master the material by doing them.

With that said, I don't like this book as much. Perhaps because the problems don't provide great movitation for the theorems- in any event, I would recommend using at least two books to understand functional analysis. One that emphasizes a rigorous approach to the theory involved, and another more applied book that allows you to play with the new tools to solve the problems functional analysis was invented to solve; quantum mechanics, for example.

Reed and Simon is a good book, although I'm sure physicists or physics students would probably complain about it for the same reason I like it- its very mathematically rigorous and has a ton of problems- 30 to 60 on average at the end of each chapter, with only a few digressions into applications into quantum physics or elementary QFT. Get this with some Springer text, like Elements of Functional Analysis.

One more note- Rudin's book is broken up into three parts- one on TVS (Topological vector spaces) that combines topological properties of a space (for example, local convexity or local compactness) with the usual vector-space operations to set the spaces where operators act.

The second section deals with distributions- I regret that one failure of "Adult Rudin" was to emphasize the abstract integral as a linear functional, because this would have helped to make the concept of a distribution more clear.

While the introduction to distributions and their connections to Fourier analysis and differential equations is nice, the text gets bogged down with proofs about convolutions that are highly technical (and make either good practice or a good time for Rudin to actually use, for once, "The details are left to the reader...").

Finally, Rudin introduces operator theory, although it could go much more smoothly- the proofs come off as way too technical, a far cry from the "slickness" his proofs are often accused of being in the graduate analysis text.

All in all, there's some interesting problems to do, but you're not going to understand the applications of Functional Analysis to quantum mechanics or PDE (other than distributions a little), where other, more applied (read: easier) books may give nice problems about applications of Hilbert space methods, such as variational techniques or Fredholm theory.

Rating:
Summary: Decent book, if you can get it cheap
Review: I strongly urge any serious math student to own a copy of both Rudin's Principles ("Baby Rudin") and his Real and Complex Analysis ("Adult Rudin"). The former is absolutely essential- without completely mastering continuity and convergence on the basic metric space topology on R^n, higher math is going to be quite a pain. The second is good because it puts the major ideas of basic analysis- Radon measures, L^p spaces, rudiments of Hilbert and Banach Spaces, differentiation and integration, Fourier and Harmonic Analysis, Holomorphic and meromorphic functions, etc. all in one nice volume, although the problems may be too challenging or tangential to master the material by doing them.

With that said, I don't like this book as much. Perhaps because the problems don't provide great movitation for the theorems- in any event, I would recommend using at least two books to understand functional analysis. One that emphasizes a rigorous approach to the theory involved, and another more applied book that allows you to play with the new tools to solve the problems functional analysis was invented to solve; quantum mechanics, for example.

Reed and Simon is a good book, although I'm sure physicists or physics students would probably complain about it for the same reason I like it- its very mathematically rigorous and has a ton of problems- 30 to 60 on average at the end of each chapter, with only a few digressions into applications into quantum physics or elementary QFT. Get this with some Springer text, like Elements of Functional Analysis.

One more note- Rudin's book is broken up into three parts- one on TVS (Topological vector spaces) that combines topological properties of a space (for example, local convexity or local compactness) with the usual vector-space operations to set the spaces where operators act.

The second section deals with distributions- I regret that one failure of "Adult Rudin" was to emphasize the abstract integral as a linear functional, because this would have helped to make the concept of a distribution more clear.

While the introduction to distributions and their connections to Fourier analysis and differential equations is nice, the text gets bogged down with proofs about convolutions that are highly technical (and make either good practice or a good time for Rudin to actually use, for once, "The details are left to the reader...").

Finally, Rudin introduces operator theory, although it could go much more smoothly- the proofs come off as way too technical, a far cry from the "slickness" his proofs are often accused of being in the graduate analysis text.

All in all, there's some interesting problems to do, but you're not going to understand the applications of Functional Analysis to quantum mechanics or PDE (other than distributions a little), where other, more applied (read: easier) books may give nice problems about applications of Hilbert space methods, such as variational techniques or Fredholm theory.

Rating:
Summary: The Bible on Distributions
Review: No other book covers the elements of distributions and the fourier transform quite like Rudin's Functional Analysis. This is a must for every budding PDE-er!

Rating:
Summary: The Bible on Distributions
Review: No other book covers the elements of distributions and the fourier transform quite like Rudin's Functional Analysis. This is a must for every budding PDE-er!