Fernando Albiac - Böcker

This book grew out of a one-semester course given by the second author in 2001 and a subsequent two-semester course in 2004-2005, both at the University of Missouri-Columbia. The text is intended for a graduate student who has already had a basic introduction to functional analysis; the aim is to give a reasonably brief and self-contained introduction to classical Banach space theory. Banach space theory has advanced dramatically in the last 50 years and we believe that the techniques that have been developed are very powerful and should be widely disseminated amongst analysts in general and not restricted to a small group of specialists. Therefore we hope that this book will also prove of interest to an audience who may not wish to pursue research in this area but still would like to understand what is known about the structure of the classical spaces. Classical Banach space theory developed as an attempt to answer very natural questions on the structure of Banach spaces; many of these questions date back to the work of Banach and his school in Lvov. It enjoyed, perhaps, its golden period between 1950 and 1980, culminating in the definitive books by Lindenstrauss and Tzafriri [138] and [139], in 1977 and 1979 respectively. The subject is still very much alive but the reader will see that much of the basic groundwork was done in this period.

This text provides the reader with the necessary technical tools and background to reach the frontiers of research without the introduction of too many extraneous concepts. Detailed and accessible proofs are included, as are a variety of exercises and problems. The two new chapters in this second edition are devoted to two topics of much current interest amongst functional analysts: Greedy approximation with respect to bases in Banach spaces and nonlinear geometry of Banach spaces.  This new material is intended to present  these two directions of research for their intrinsic importance within Banach space theory, and to motivate graduate students interested in learning more about them.This textbook assumes only a basic knowledge of functional analysis, giving the reader a self-contained overview of the ideas and techniques in the development of modern Banach space theory. Special emphasis is placed on the study of the classical Lebesgue spaces Lp (and their sequence space analogues) and spaces of continuous functions. The authors also stress the use of bases and basic sequences techniques as a tool for understanding the isomorphic structure of Banach spaces.From the reviews of the First Edition:"The authors of the book…succeeded admirably in creating a very helpful text, which contains essential topics with optimal proofs, while being reader friendly… It is also written in a lively manner, and its involved mathematical proofs are elucidated and illustrated by motivations, explanations and occasional historical comments… I strongly recommend to every graduate student who wants to get acquainted with this exciting part of functional analysis the instructive and pleasant reading of this book…"—Gilles Godefroy, Mathematical Reviews