Linear Functional Analysis

This book provides an introduction to the ideas and methods of linear func­ tional analysis at a level appropriate to the final year of an undergraduate course at a British university. The prerequisites for reading it are a standard undergraduate knowledge of linear algebra and real analysis (including the the­ ory of metric spaces). Part of the development of functional analysis can be traced to attempts to find a suitable framework in which to discuss differential and integral equa­ tions. Often, the appropriate setting turned out to be a vector space of real or complex-valued functions defined on some set. In general, such a vector space is infinite-dimensional. This leads to difficulties in that, although many of the elementary properties of finite-dimensional vector spaces hold in infinite­ dimensional vector spaces, many others do not. For example, in general infinite­ dimensional vector spaces there is no framework in which to make sense of an­ alytic concepts such as convergence and continuity. Nevertheless, on the spaces of most interest to us there is often a norm (which extends the idea of the length of a vector to a somewhat more abstract setting). Since a norm on a vector space gives rise to a metric on the space, it is now possible to do analysis in the space. As real or complex-valued functions are often called functionals, the term functional analysis came to be used for this topic. We now briefly outline the contents of the book.