Table of contents

These notes revolve around three similarity problems, appearing in three dif ferent contexts, but all dealing with the space B(H) of all bounded operators on a complex Hilbert space H. The first one deals with group representations, the second one with C* -algebras and the third one with the disc algebra. We describe them in detail in the introduction which follows. This volume is devoted to the background necessary to understand these three open problems, to the solutions that are known in some special cases and to numerous related concepts, results, counterexamples or extensions which their investigation has generated. For instance, we are naturally lead to study various Banach spaces formed by the matrix coefficients of group representations. Furthermore, we discuss the closely connected Schur multipliers and Grothendieck's striking characterization of those which act boundedly on B(H). While the three problems seem different, it is possible to place them in a common framework using the key concept of "complete boundedness", which we present in detail. In some sense, completely bounded maps can also be viewed as spaces of "coefficients" of C*-algebraic representations, if we allow "B(H) valued coefficients", this is the content of the fundamental factorization property of these maps, which plays a central role in this volume. Using this notion, the three problems can all be formulated as asking whether "boundedness" implies "complete boundedness" for linear maps satisfying cer tain additional algebraic identities.

These notes revolve around three similarity problems, appearing in three different contexts, but all dealing with the space B(H) of all bounded operators on a complex Hilbert space H. The first one deals with group representations, the second one with C* -algebras and the third one with the disc algebra. We describe them in detail in the introduction which follows. This volume is devoted to the background necessary to understand these three problems, to the solutions that are known in some special cases and to numerous related concepts, results, counterexamples or extensions which their investigation has generated. While the three problems seem different, it is possible to place them in a common framework using the key concept of "complete boundedness", which we present in detail. Using this notion, the three problems can all be formulated as asking whether "boundedness" implies "complete boundedness" for linear maps satisfying certain additional algebraic identities.

The authors develop elements of a general dilation theory for operator-valued measures. Hilbert space operator-valued measures are closely related to bounded linear maps on abelian von Neumann algebras, and some of their results include new dilation results for bounded linear maps that are not necessarily completely bounded, and from domain algebras that are not necessarily abelian. In the non-cb case the dilation space often needs to be a Banach space. They give applications to both the discrete and the continuous frame theory. There are natural associations between the theory of frames (including continuous frames and framings), the theory of operator-valued measures on sigma-algebras of sets, and the theory of continuous linear maps between -algebras. In this connection frame theory itself is identified with the special case in which the domain algebra for the maps is an abelian von Neumann algebra and the map is normal (i.e. ultraweakly, or weakly, or w*) continuous.

This book is based on the conference on Function Spaces held at Southern Illinois University at Edwardsville, in April, 1990. It is designed to cover a wide range of topics, including spaces of analytic functions, isometries of function spaces, geometry of Banach spaces, and Banach algebras.

These 35 refereed articles report on recent and original results in various areas of operator theory and connected fields, many of them strongly related to contributions of Sz.-Nagy. The scientific part of the book is preceeded by fifty pages of biographical material, including several photos.