G.M. Khenkin - Böcker

From the reviews: "...In sum, the volume under review is the first quarter of an important work that surveys an active branch of modern mathematics. Some of the individual articles are reminiscent in style of the early volumes of the first Ergebnisse series and will probably prove to be equally useful as a reference; ...for the appropriate reader, they will be valuable sources of information about modern complex analysis. " Bulletin of the Am. Math. Society, 1991"...This remarkable book has a helpfully informal style, abundant motivation, outlined proofs followed by precise references, and an extensive bibliography; it will be an invaluable reference and a companion to modern courses on several complex variables. " ZAMP, Zeitschrift fur Angewandte Mathematik und Physik, 1990

Plurisubharmonic functions playa major role in the theory of functions of several complex variables. The extensiveness of plurisubharmonic functions, the simplicity of their definition together with the richness of their properties and. most importantly, their close connection with holomorphic functions have assured plurisubharmonic functions a lasting place in multidimensional complex analysis. (Pluri)subharmonic functions first made their appearance in the works of Hartogs at the beginning of the century. They figure in an essential way, for example, in the proof of the famous theorem of Hartogs (1906) on joint holomorphicity. Defined at first on the complex plane IC, the class of subharmonic functions became thereafter one of the most fundamental tools in the investigation of analytic functions of one or several variables. The theory of subharmonic functions was developed and generalized in various directions: subharmonic functions in Euclidean space IRn, plurisubharmonic functionsin complex space en and others. Subharmonic functions and the foundations ofthe associated classical poten­ tial theory are sufficiently well exposed in the literature, and so we introduce here only a few fundamental results which we require. More detailed expositions can be found in the monographs of Privalov (1937), Brelot (1961), and Landkof (1966). See also Brelot (1972), where a history of the development of the theory of subharmonic functions is given.

In this part, we present a survey of mean-periodicity phenomena which arise in connection with classical questions in complex analysis, partial differential equations, and more generally, convolution equations. A common feature of the problem we shall consider is the fact that their solutions depend on tech­ niques and ideas from complex analysis. One finds in this way a remarkable and fruitful interplay between mean-periodicity and complex analysis. This is exactly what this part will try to explore. It is probably appropriate to stress the classical flavor of all of our treat­ ment. Even though we shall frequently refer to recent results and the latest theories (such as algebmic analysis, or the theory of Bernstein-Sato polyno­ mials), it is important to observe that the roots of probably all the problems we discuss here are classical in spirit, since that is the approach we use. For instance, most of Chap. 2 is devoted to far-reaching generalizations of a result dating back to Euler, and it is soon discovered that the key tool for such gen­ eralizations was first introduced by Jacobi! As the reader will soon discover, similar arguments can be made for each of the subsequent chapters. Before we give a complete description of our work on a chapter-by-chapter basis, let us make a remark about the list of references. It is quite hard (maybe even impossible) to provide a complete list of references on such a vast topic.