Functional analysis owes its OrIgms to the discovery of certain striking analogies between apparently distinct disciplines of mathematics such as analysis, algebra, and geometry. At the turn of the nineteenth century, a number of observations, made sporadically over the preceding years, began to inspire systematic investigations into the common features of these three disciplines, which have developed rather independently of each other for so long. It was found that many concepts of this triad-analysis, algebra, geometry-could be incorporated into a single, but considerably more abstract, new...