Description

This work has arisen from lecture courses given by the authors on important topics within functional analysis. The authors, who are all leading researchers, give introductions to their subjects at a level ideal for beginning graduate students, and others interested in the subject. The collection has been carefully edited so as to form a coherent and accessible introduction to current research topics. The first chapter by Professor Dales introduces the general theory of Banach algebras, which serves as a background to the remaining material. Dr Willis then studies a centrally important Banach algebra, the group algebra of a locally compact group. The remaining chapters are devoted to Banach algebras of operators on Banach spaces: Professor Eschmeier gives all the background for the exciting topic of invariant subspaces of operators, and discusses some key open problems; Dr Laursen and Professor Aiena discuss local spectral theory for operators, leading into Fredholm theory.