Operator Theory by Example

Book excerpt: Aimed at graduate students, this textbook provides an accessible and comprehensive introduction to operator theory. Rather than discuss the subject in the abstract, this textbook covers the subject through twenty examples of a wide variety of operators, discussing the norm, spectrum, commutant, invariant subspaces, and interesting properties of each operator. The text is supplemented by over 600 end-of-chapter exercises, designed to help the reader master the topics covered in the chapter, as well as providing an opportunity to further explore the vast operator theory literature. Each chapter also contains well-researched historical facts which place each chapter within the broader context of the development of the field as a whole.