P Adic Functional Analysis

"Contains research articles by nearly 40 leading mathematicians from North and South America, Europe, Africa, and Asia, presented at the Fourth International Conference on p-adic Functional Analysis held recently in Nijmegen, The Netherlands. Includes numerous new open problems documented with extensive comments and references."

Discovered at the turn of the 20th century, p-adic numbers are frequently used by mathematicians and physicists. This text is a self-contained presentation of basic p-adic analysis with a focus on analytic topics. It offers many features rarely treated in introductory p-adic texts such as topological models of p-adic spaces inside Euclidian space, a special case of Hazewinkel’s functional equation lemma, and a treatment of analytic elements.

This volume collects together lectures presented at the Sixth International Conference held at the University of Ioannina, Greece, on p-adic functional analysis with applications in the fields of physics, differential equations, number theory, probability theory, dynamical systems, and algebraic number fields. It discusses the commutation relation AB-BA=I and its central role in quantum mechanics.

A presentation of results in p-adic Banach spaces, spaces over fields with an infinite rank valuation, Frechet (and locally convex) spaces with Schauder bases, function spaces, p-adic harmonic analysis, and related areas. It showcases research results in functional analysis over nonarchimedean valued complete fields. It explores spaces of continuous functions, isometries, Banach Hopf algebras, summability methods, fractional differentiation over local fields, and adelic formulas for gamma- and beta-functions in algebraic number theory.

"Written by accomplished and well-known researchers in the field, this unique volume discusses important research topics on p-adic functional analysis and closely related areas, provides an authoritative overview of the main investigative fronts where developments are expected in the future, and more. "

"Written by accomplished and well-known researchers in the field, this unique volume discusses important research topics on p-adic functional analysis and closely related areas, provides an authoritative overview of the main investigative fronts where developments are expected in the future, and more. "

This book grew out of a course which I gave during the winter term 1997/98 at the Universitat Munster. The course covered the material which here is presented in the first three chapters. The fourth more advanced chapter was added to give the reader a rather complete tour through all the important aspects of the theory of locally convex vector spaces over nonarchimedean fields. There is one serious restriction, though, which seemed inevitable to me in the interest of a clear presentation. In its deeper aspects the theory depends very much on the field being spherically complete or not. To give a drastic example, if the field is not spherically complete then there exist nonzero locally convex vector spaces which do not have a single nonzero continuous linear form. Although much progress has been made to overcome this problem a really nice and complete theory which to a large extent is analogous to classical functional analysis can only exist over spherically complete field8. I therefore allowed myself to restrict to this case whenever a conceptual clarity resulted. Although I hope that thi8 text will also be useful to the experts as a reference my own motivation for giving that course and writing this book was different. I had the reader in mind who wants to use locally convex vector spaces in the applications and needs a text to quickly gra8p this theory.