Functional Analysis

Rating:
Summary: Excellent
Review: Peter D Lax is one of the great mathematicians of the 2nd half of the 20th century. Buy this book if only to have it on your bookshelf. After a long day of suffering fools and putting up with the latest insanities of your university administrators, leaf through Lax's book to recover. This is mathematics at its best. What better use can we put mathematics to, than to help us regain our sanity in a world that's gone mad.

Rating:
Summary: Brings the subject to life!
Review: 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. It 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. 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. Peter Lax has himself,-- alone and with others, shaped some of greatest successes of the period, right up to the present. That is in the book!! And it offers an upbeat outlook for the future. It has been tested in the class room,-it is really user-friendly. At the end of each chapter P Lax ofers personal recollections;-- little known stories of how several of the pioneers in the subject have been victims,- in the 30ties and the 40ties, of Nazi atrocities. The writing is crisp and engaged,- the exercises are great;- just
right for students to learn from. This is the book to teach from.