Customer Reviews

Analysis (Graduate Studies in Mathematics)

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A start in analysis.-- For some number of years, Rudin's "Real and Complex", and a few other analysis books, served as the canonical choice for the book to use, and to teach from, in a first year grad analysis course. Lieb-Loss offers a refreshing alternative: It begins with a down-to-earth intro to measure theory, L^p and all that...It aims at a wide range of essential applications, such as the Fourier transform, and series, inequalities, distributions, and Sobolev spaces,--- PDE, potential theory, calculus of variations, and math physics (Schrodinger's equation, the hydrogen atom, Thomas-Fermi theory... to mention a few.) The book should work equallly well in a one, or in a two semester course. The first half of the book covers the basics, and the rest will be great for students to have, regardless of whether or not it gets to be included in a course. This choice of book is also especially agreeable to grad students in physics who need to read up on the tools of analysis.

By the end of the sixties Dyson and Lennard, for the first time, proved that matter is stable. More precisely, they proved the thermodynamic stability of Coulomb matter. This was a landmark of mathematical physics, and a huge one: a very long and hard paper. A few years later, Elliott Lieb and Walter Thirring substantially improved the great Dyson result, dramatically cutting its length while improving important estimates. A very good review of these results can be find in the volume 4 of Thirring's "A Course in Mathematical Physics". Even the book version is a bit hard to read, as much mathematical analysis is required. The "Analysis" of Lieb and Loss is a book on analysis which has as a theme the great result of Lieb and Thirring. It is a real book on analysis. The chapters are named "Measure and Integration", "Lp-spaces","The Fourier transform", "Distributions", but also "Potential Theory and Coulomb En! ergies" and "Introduction to the Calculus of Variations", where nothing less than the Thomas-Fermi atom is rigorously studied. In order to leave no doubt that hard analysis is present, there are two chapters on Inequalities. After studying this splendid text the reader will be a better analist and, if he cares to, can start reading the proof of stability of matter. The proof of the pudding is NOT in the eating!

I am a physicist with a somewhat limited mathematical background. However, I decided to 'break in' in modern mathematical physics, and that meant acquiring first a modicum of functional analysis and the required measure theory, harmonic analysis, and operator theory that goes with it. If you can afford the time, the classical learning path through, e.g., Kolmogorov & Fomin > Rudin (R&C) > Reed & Simon I (a path that I recommend, by the way), with possible excursions into ODEs and PDEs, probability theory, and modern geometry, is the safe way to go. If you cannot afford the time, read Lieb & Loss. It provides a tremendous jump start into what really matters for a beginning mathematical physicist: a little measure theory, L^p spaces, Sobolev spaces, a bit of Fourier analysis and PDEs, and inequalities -- lots of them (integral, Sobolev, variational). The main theorems are stated, most with proofs, and put into use.

I had a mathematical physics teacher in graduate school that once said (somewhat half-jokingly) that all you need to know is the monotone and dominated convergence theorems, the Fubini theorem, the Borel-Cantelli lemma, the Euler-Lagrange equations and how to resolve the identity using plane waves. This book by Lieb & Loss is a testimony to his confession.