An Introduction to Hilbert Space

I must strongly disagree with the reader from Sao Paolo who says that chapters 12 and 13 are poorly motivated. These chapters are crucial for the final theorem of the book in chapter 16. Parrott's Theorem in chapter 12 is the key to the foundational Nehari's theorem of chapter 15. Chapter 13 explores Hardy spaces which are the setting place for the major theorem of Adamyan, Arov, and Krein in chapter 16. In fact, I found the movement of ideas from chapter 12 to chapter 16 to be marvelously compelling. These chapters have extreme importance for theoretically oriented control engineers.

Only a modicum of real and complex analysis is necessary to understand the book. Knowledge of measure theory is not required.


Very Clear,short and useful   October 20, 2000
 8 out of 8 found this review helpful

The first eleven chapters are an excellent introduction to functional analysis . Both Hilbert and Banach spaces are introduced carefully. Then there are two short chapters on orthogonal expansions and classical fourier series and then linear operators are studied. From the point of view of a person who is interested in applications to physics and engineering one can say that the book is well motivated mainly because is so compact and because of the many notes on applications. Chapters nine , ten and eleven on Green's functions and eigenfunctions expansions are extremely good. Chapters twelve and thirteen are poorly motivated from the point of view of applications.Finally chapters fourteen to sixteen try to exhibit the applications to complex analysis of operator theory and be helpfull to eletrical engineers.I think the book fails in this. So the ten first chapters of the book are excellent . The remaining less so


An unusually readable book on Hilbert space   June 12, 2000
 9 out of 9 found this review helpful

An unusually readable book on Hilbert space. Very clean notation and very detailed proofs. There are also numerous diagrams. There are also answers to selected problems, but no detailed solutions. If you own one book on Hilbert space, or even functional analysis, this should be it. The author takes great pains to illustrate the ideas involved, not just pound out the theorems.