Lars Hormander – författare

This book presents, for the first time, the unpublished manuscripts of Lars Hörmander, written between 1951 and 2007. Hörmander himself organised the manuscripts and also wrote the notes explaining their origins, presenting the material in the form he fully intended it to be published in. As his daughter, Sofia Broström, mentions in the Foreword, towards the end of his life, Hörmander "carefully went through his unpublished manuscripts, checking and revising each of them with his very critical eye, deciding what should be kept for posterity and what should be thrown out". He also compiled the complete bibliography of all his published mathematical works that is included at the end of the present book.

Of both historical and mathematical value, the contents of this book will undoubtedly inspire mathematicians of different horizons.

This volume is an expanded version of Chapters III, IV, V and VII of my 1963 book "Linear partial differential operators". In addition there is an entirely new chapter on convolution equations, one on scattering theory, and one on methods from the theory of analytic functions of several complex variables. The latter is somewhat limited in scope though since it seems superfluous to duplicate the monographs by Ehrenpreis and by Palamodov on this subject. The reader is assumed to be familiar with distribution theory as presented in Volume I. Most topics discussed here have in fact been encountered in Volume I in special cases, which should provide the necessary motivation and background for a more systematic and precise exposition. The main technical tool in this volume is the Fourier- Laplace transformation. More powerful methods for the study of operators with variable coefficients will be developed in Volume III. However, constant coefficient theory has given the guidance for all that work. Although the field is no longer very active - perhaps because of its advanced state of development - and although it is possible to pass directly from Volume I to Volume III, the material presented here should not be neglected by the serious student who wants to gain a balanced perspective of the theory of linear partial differen­tial equations.

From the reviews:

"Volumes III and IV complete L. Hörmander''s treatise on linear partial differential equations. They constitute the most complete and up-to-date account of this subject, by the author who has dominated it and made the most significant contributions in the last decades.....It is a superb book, which must be present in every mathematical library, and an indispensable tool for all - young and old - interested in the theory of partial differential operators." L. Boutet de Monvel in Bulletin of the American Mathematical Society, 1987.

"This treatise is outstanding in every respect and must be counted among the great books in mathematics. It is certainly no easy reading (...) but a careful study is extremely rewarding for its wealth of ideas and techniques and the beauty of presentation." J. Brüning in Zentralblatt MATH, 1987.

From the reviews:

"Volumes III and IV complete L. Hörmander''s treatise on linear partial differential equations. They constitute the most complete and up-to-date account of this subject, by the author who has dominated it and made the most significant contributions in the last decades.....It is a superb book, which must be present in every mathematical library, and an indispensable tool for all - young and old - interested in the theory of partial differential operators." L. Boutet de Monvel in Bulletin of the American Mathematical Society, 1987

"This treatise is outstanding in every respect and must be counted among the great books in mathematics. It is certainly no easy reading (...) but a careful study is extremely rewarding for its wealth of ideas and techniques and the beauty of presentation." J. Brüning in Zentralblatt MATH, 1987

Honours awarded to Lars Hörmander: Fields Medal 1962, Speaker at International Congress 1970, Wolf Prize 1988, AMS Steele Prize2006