The great mathematician G. H. Hardy told us that "Beauty is the ?rst test: there is no permanent place in the world for ugly mathematics" (see 24, p. 85]). It is clear why Hardy loved complex analysis: it is a very beautiful partofclassicalmathematics. ThetheoryofHilbertspacesandofoperatorson themisalmostasclassicalandisperhapsasbeautifulascomplexanalysis. The studyoftheHardy-Hilbertspace(aHilbertspacewhoseelementsareanalytic functions), and of operators on that space, combines these two subjects. The interplay produces a number of extraordinarily elegant results. For example, very...

A collection of matrices is said to be triangularizable if there is an invertible matrix S such that S1 AS is upper triangular for every A in the collection. This generalization of commutativity is the subject of many classical theorems due to Engel, Kolchin, Kaplansky, McCoy and others. The concept has been extended to collections of bounded linear operators on Banach spaces: such a collection is defined to be triangularizable if there is a maximal chain of subspaces of the Banach space, each of which is invariant under every member of the collection. Most of the classical results have been...

Paul Richard Halmos, who lived a life of unbounded devotion to mathematics and to the mathematical community, died at the age of 90 on October 2, 2006. This volume is a memorial to Paul by operator theorists he inspired. Paul'sinitial research, beginning with his 1938Ph.D. thesis at the University of Illinois under Joseph Doob, was in probability, ergodic theory, and measure theory. A shift occurred in the 1950s when Paul's interest in foundations led him to invent a subject he termed algebraic logic, resulting in a succession of papers on that subject appearing between 1954 and 1961, and the...

A collection of matrices is said to be triangularizable if there is an invertible matrix S such that S1 AS is upper triangular for every A in the collection. This generalization of commutativity is the subject of many classical theorems due to Engel, Kolchin, Kaplansky, McCoy and others. The concept has been extended to collections of bounded linear operators on Banach spaces: such a collection is defined to be triangularizable if there is a maximal chain of subspaces of the Banach space, each of which is invariant under every member of the collection. Most of the classical results have been...

The great mathematician G. H. Hardy told us that "Beauty is the ?rst test: there is no permanent place in the world for ugly mathematics" (see 24, p. 85]). It is clear why Hardy loved complex analysis: it is a very beautiful partofclassicalmathematics. ThetheoryofHilbertspacesandofoperatorson themisalmostasclassicalandisperhapsasbeautifulascomplexanalysis. The studyoftheHardy-Hilbertspace(aHilbertspacewhoseelementsareanalytic functions), and of operators on that space, combines these two subjects. The interplay produces a number of extraordinarily elegant results. For example, very...

In recent years there has been a large amount of work on invariant subspaces, motivated by interest in the structure of non-self-adjoint of the results have been obtained in operators on Hilbert space. Some the context of certain general studies: the theory of the characteristic operator function, initiated by Livsic; the study of triangular models by Brodskii and co-workers; and the unitary dilation theory of Sz.- Nagy and Foia ? Other theorems have proofs and interest independent of any particular structure theory. Since the leading workers in each of the structure theories have written...

Paul Richard Halmos, who lived a life of unbounded devotion to mathematics and to the mathematical community, died at the age of 90 on October 2, 2006. This volume is a memorial to Paul by operator theorists he inspired. Paul'sinitial research, beginning with his 1938Ph.D. thesis at the University of Illinois under Joseph Doob, was in probability, ergodic theory, and measure theory. A shift occurred in the 1950s when Paul's interest in foundations led him to invent a subject he termed algebraic logic, resulting in a succession of papers on that subject appearing between 1954 and 1961, and the...

Designed for an undergraduate course or for independent study, this textbook presents sophisticated mathematical ideas in an elementary and friendly fashion. It features techniques to solve proofs as well as exercises of varying difficulty.