Skip to main content
Search type Search syntax
Tags [tag]
Exact "words here"
Author user:1234
user:me (yours)
Score score:3 (3+)
score:0 (none)
Answers answers:3 (3+)
answers:0 (none)
isaccepted:yes
hasaccepted:no
inquestion:1234
Views views:250
Code code:"if (foo != bar)"
Sections title:apples
body:"apples oranges"
URL url:"*.example.com"
Saves in:saves
Status closed:yes
duplicate:no
migrated:no
wiki:no
Types is:question
is:answer
Exclude -[tag]
-apples
For more details on advanced search visit our help page
Results tagged with
Search options not deleted user 290

Banach spaces, function spaces, real functions, integral transforms, theory of distributions, measure theory.

30 votes

What is an intuitive view of adjoints? (version 2: functional analysis)

It seems like you're thinking about adjoints with respect to an inner product, but I find it more natural to think of adjoints as a way to get a map $B^{\ast} \to A^{\ast}$ from a map $A \to B$ and th …
Qiaochu Yuan's user avatar
20 votes
3 answers
4k views

What is the origin of the term "spectrum" in mathematics?

The use of the term "spectrum" to denote the prime ideals of a ring originates from the case that the ring is, say, $\mathbb{C}[T]$ where $T$ is a linear operator on a finite-dimensional vector space; …
Qiaochu Yuan's user avatar
15 votes

If $A$ is the ring of continuous functions on a genus $g$ surface, can the genus of $X$ be s...

I'll assume we're talking about complex functions; if real, tensor with $\mathbb{C}$. Now pass to the group of units. With the topology given by spectral radius (this is an algebraic description of th …
Qiaochu Yuan's user avatar
15 votes
Accepted

Conceptually, what does unitization do?

Unitization and metric completion are both left adjoint functors, as are may other "-tion" operations in mathematics, such as localization or abelianization. Specifically, there is a forgetful functor …
Qiaochu Yuan's user avatar
11 votes
Accepted

What function has fourier series the harmonic series?

It's a standard series computation to show that $$ \sum_{n \ge 1} \frac{x^n}{n} = \log \frac{1}{1 - x} $$ Now substitute $x = e^{i t}$ and take the real part. (As an aside, the reason I write th …
Qiaochu Yuan's user avatar
11 votes

Nice applications of the spectral theorem?

The spectral theorem in the finite-dimensional case is important in spectral graph theory: the adjacency matrix and Laplacian of an undirected graph are both symmetric, hence both have real eigenvalue …
Qiaochu Yuan's user avatar
9 votes

Generalizations of "standard" calculus

I can answer your last question, at least. The derivative acts as a shift operator on Taylor series, so the operator $\frac{d}{dx} - 1$ acts as the forward difference on Taylor series. So their eige …
Qiaochu Yuan's user avatar
8 votes

What is the relationship amongst all the different kinds of spectra?

As far as I can tell, every example except the last is representation theory, understood in a suitably general sense. For example studying the eigenvalues of an operator is the same as studying the co …
7 votes
Accepted

Lower bound for spectral radius on $\operatorname{GL}(n,\mathbb{Z})$

Every monic integer polynomial $f(x) \in \mathbb{Z}[x]$ of degree $n$ is the characteristic polynomial of an $n \times n$ matrix, namely its companion matrix. The companion matrix is invertible iff th …
Qiaochu Yuan's user avatar
7 votes
Accepted

Symmetric basis of harmonic homogeneous polynomials

Already the desired result is false for $n = 3, m = 2$, but for simpler reasons than I suggested in the comments. In this case the polynomials you give are $x^2 - 2y^2 + z^2, xy$ and their permutation …
Qiaochu Yuan's user avatar
7 votes

Spectra of elements of a Banach algebra and the role played by the Hahn-Banach Theorem.

I do not believe that the Hahn-Banach theorem is necessary. At some point I had planned on writing up a blog post verifying this but I lost the motivation... The idea is that you can prove Liouville …
Qiaochu Yuan's user avatar
6 votes

$\ell^1$ functor as left adjoint to unit ball functor

You want to take the category $\text{Ban}_1$ of Banach spaces and short maps (linear maps of operator norm $\le 1$). The unit ball functor $U : \text{Ban}_1 \to \text{Set}$ is represented by $\mathbb{ …
Qiaochu Yuan's user avatar
4 votes
Accepted

What is the character that compactifies $\mathbb{R}$ through the Gelfand transform?

The Stone-Čech compactification of $\mathbb{R}$ is not its one-point compactification. The former is the largest compactification of a space, while the latter, if it exists, is the smallest compactifi …
Qiaochu Yuan's user avatar
3 votes

Multivariate functions whose value is independent of the order of the arguments

I don't understand why you say that $f$ is continuous if its inputs are positive integers. Anyway, you can take any symmetric polynomial in the $g(r_i)$, e.g. $\sum_{i < j} g(r_i) g(r_j)$.
Qiaochu Yuan's user avatar
2 votes

Is there a nice "synthetic" way for doing differential geometry on infinite dimensional vect...

Your first requirement suggests to me that you want to think of an infinite-dimensional vector space as an ind-object, namely the filtered colimit of its finite-dimensional subspaces. If so, one forma …
Qiaochu Yuan's user avatar

15 30 50 per page