DEPARTMENTAL SEMINAR

The spectral type of sums of operators

Speaker: Dr. Ian Doust (UNSW)
Date: Tuesday, 1 March 2005
Time: 2:00 pm
Venue: RC-4082, The Red Centre, UNSW

The sum of two commuting normal operators is easily seen
to be normal. Even better, they can be simultaneously diagonalized.
Once one leaves the Hilbert space setting, there are many
possible generalizations of being normal or self-adjoint.
Some of these involve spectral decompositions and some involve
functional calculus properties. Just which of these properties
are preserved under the taking of sums is a classical problem
which has been studied for 50 years or more. In this talk we
shall discuss some of the history and also some of the very
recent progress in this area.

Enquiries to Catherine Greenhill, 9385 7105, csg@unsw.edu.au