Measure Theory and Fine Properties of Functions

Rating:
Summary: Inspiring and Useful
Review: I was turned on to this book by a friend of mine who is an expert in geometric measure theory. He recommended the book as a very nice exposition of some of the material found in Federer's "Geometric Measure Theory" as well as other material. I found the book to be beautifully designed to help the reader learn its contents. There was enough between the lines so that one needed to WORK through the book, but in contrast to parts of Federer's book, enough detail so that reasonably fast progress could be made. Unfortunately, I was interupted in my race through the book and so I have yet to work through the latter part of the book. But given the large part I did cover and my experience doing that, I am certain to finish the monograph, most likely when I start using functions of bounded variation with any frequency.

There are no explicit exercises. But as already alluded to above, there are implicit exercises that are encountered in working through the book. I found that the lack of separate exercises is actually not bad at all since the implicit exercises encountered are automatically motivated by their necessity for the understanding of the text - and are therefore relevant!

A prerequisite for the book is a course in analysis that includes measure theory and integration as well as an exposure to elementary functional analysis. The functional analysis is not actually necessary, but the added maturity that such an exposure would impart would be useful.

Very briefly, the contents via the 6 chapter titles are 1) General Measure Theory, 2) Hausdorff Measure, 3) Area and Coarea Formulas, 4) Sobolev Functions, 5) BV Functions and Sets of Finite Perimeter, and 6) Differentiability and Approximation by C^1 Functions.

I found the contents very interesting ... quoting the authors "... we packed into these notes all sorts of interesting topics that working mathematical analysts need to know, but are mostly not taught." And indeed this was the case in my experience ... both the "interesting" part and the "not taught" part.

I am disappointed in the price, but if any book is worth it, this one certainly is.