A virtually self-contained treatment of Hilbert space theory which is suitable for advanced undergraduates and graduate students.
Professor Retherford's aim in this book is to provide the reader with a virtually self-contained treatment of Hilbert space theory, leading to an elementary proof of the Lidskij trace theorem. Many exercises and hints are included, and throughout the emphasis is on a user-friendly approach.
1. Preliminaries; 2. Orthogonality; 3. Isomorphisms and isometries; 4. Bounded linear operators; 5. Elementary spectral theory; 6. Self-adjoint operators; 7. Compact operators on Hilbert space; 8. Square roots; 9. The weak Weyl inequality; 10. Hilbert¿Schmidt and trace class operators; 11. The Lidskij trace theorem; Bibliography.