Apr 012012
 

My poor blog! I left it abandoned and barren for too long. I will try to post more regularly, though, as usual, I can’t promise anything.

I have been traveling in the past two weeks, visiting graduate schools and trying to decide where I want to spend my life for the next five years. I think it would be impolite to relay my impressions of the schools I visited on a blog, so I will resist the urge. Instead, I would like to share some information I have gathered at the visits that are of interest to fellow apprentice analysts.

On Friday, I learned that Professor Brett Wick at Georgia Tech is running the Internet Analysis Seminar, which, I believe, is on its third year. The idea is to collaborate on studying the basic material via the internet, and then to gather at a week-long conference to discuss the more advanced material. In a sense, it is fairly similar to Professor Christoph Thiele‘s Summer Schools in Analysis, except that Thiele’s summer school does not have the centralized coverage of the basic material that Wick’s seminar has. Indeed, Wick writes up lecture notes for the seminar, which can be found here and there.

Also, the University of Wisconsin at Madison has been awarded the NSF Research Training Groups grant in analysis. UW’s summary of the grant is as follows:

UW Math Professors Alexander Kiselev, Andreas Seeger and Leslie Smith have received an RTG grant from the NSF. The title of their grant is “Analysis and Applications”, and its approved budget is $1.8 million for 5 years. The funds are mostly for support of graduate students, postdocs, and undergraduate research. The proposal ranked first among RTG in Analysis submitted this year to the NSF. The grant involves faculty members in both analysis and applied mathematics groups.

I expect that UW will host many seminars, conferences, and workshops on harmonic analysis, partial differential equations, fluid dynamics, and mathematical biology.

Oct 192011
 

This is a transcription of the September 15 talk by Prof. Camil Muscalu at the Courant Institute. Any errors in this post are due to my interpretation of the talk.

* * * * *

Part 1. Triangular Fourier Series

What is a triangular Fourier series? Let us suppose that f is a 2\pi-periodic function on \mathbb{R}. If f \in L^p([0,2\pi]) for some 1 < p < \infty, we know that the classical Fourier series

\displaystyle \sum_{n=-\infty}^{\infty} \hat{f}(n) e^{i n x}

converges to f(x), both in the L^p-sense (M. Riesz) and in the pointwise almost-everywhere sense (L. Carleson and R. Hunt). These results can be phrased in terms of boundedness of certain operators. For one, the L^p-convergence happens if and only if the operator

\displaystyle f \mapsto \sum_{-N \leq n \leq N} \hat{f}(n) e^{inx}

is bounded on L^p for all N. Similarly, the almost-everywhere convergence happens if and only if the operator

\displaystyle f \mapsto \sup_N \left| \sum_{-N \leq n \leq N} \hat{f}(n) e^{inx} \right|

is bounded on L^p.

So then, we have a clear notion of the convergence

\displaystyle \sum_{-N \leq n \leq N} \hat{f}(n) e^{inx} \xrightarrow{N \to \infty} f(x).

Why not take the square, and obtain:

\displaystyle \left( \sum_{-N \leq n \leq N} \hat{f}(n) e^{inx} \right)^2 \xrightarrow{N \to \infty} f(x)^2.

We expand the left-hand side as follows:

\begin{array}{rcl} \displaystyle \left( \sum_{-N \leq n \leq N} \hat{f}(n) e^{inx} \right)^2 &=& \displaystyle \sum_{-N \leq n_1,n_2 \leq N} \hat{f}(n_1) \hat{f}(n_2) e^{in_1x} e^{in_2x} \\ &=& \displaystyle \sum_{-N \leq n_1 < n_2 \leq N} \hat{f}(n_1)\hat{f}(n_2) e^{in_1x}e^{in_2x} \\ & & + \displaystyle \sum_{-N \leq n_2 < n_1 \leq N} \hat{f}(n_1)\hat{f}(n_2) e^{in_1x}e^{in_2x} \\ & & + \displaystyle \sum_{-N \leq n_1 = n_2 \leq N} \hat{f}(n_1)\hat{f}(n_2) e^{in_1x}e^{in_2x}\end{array}.

The last term is the convolution (f*f)(2x).

We can now ask ourselves the following questions: (1) Does the following convergence happen?

\displaystyle \sum_{-N \leq n_1 < n_2 \leq N} \hat{f}(n_1) \hat{f}(n_2) e^{in_1x} e^{in_2x} \to \frac{1}{2} (f(x)^2 - (f*f)(2x));

(2) Similarly, does the following convergence happen?

\textbf{(1) }\displaystyle \sum_{-N \leq n_1 < n_2 \leq N} \hat{f}(n_1) \hat{g}(n_2) e^{in_1x} e^{in_2x} \to \frac{1}{2}(f(x)g(x) - (f*g)(2x)),

where f,g \in L^2([0,2\pi])?

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