Abstract
M.Sc. (Mathematics)
Any sensible piece of writing has an intended readership. Conversely, any piece of writing that has no intended readership has no sense. These are axioms of authorship and necessary directions to any prospective author. The aim of this dissertation was to serve as an experimental exposition of the analysis of the resolvent operator. Its intended readership is therefore graduate-level students in operator theory and Banach algebras. The analysis included in this dissertation is of a specific kind: it includes and occasionally extends beyond the analysis of a function at certain of its singularities of finite order. The exposition is experimental in the sense that it does not even aim at a comprehensive review of analysis of the resolvent operator, but it is concerned with that part of it which seems to have interesting and useful results and which appears to be the most suggestive of further research. In order to obtain an exhaustive exposition, we still lack a study of the properties of the resolvent operator where it is differentiable
(which seemingly entails little more than undergraduate-level complex analysis), and a study of essential singularities of the resolvent operator (which seems too difficult for the expository style). A brief overview of the contents of this dissertation is in order: a chapter introducing some analytic concepts used throughout this dissertation; a chapter on poles of order 1 follows (so-called simple poles), where the Gelfand theorem (2.1.1) is the most important result; a chapter on poles of higher order, where the Hille theorem is the most prominent; and lastly some topics that have arisen out of the study of poles of the resolvent, collected in chapter 4. I should make it abundantly clear to the reader that although this dissertation is my work, it does not for the most part follow that the result are my own. What is my own is the arrangement, but as it is a literature study, the results are mainly those of other authors. My own addition has been mostly notes, usually in italics. The literature study has benefited very much from Zemanek's paper (Zemanek,[54]), and I am deeply indebted to him for it. Incidentally, this has also been a chance to exhibit my style of citation; the number corresponds to the number of the citation in the bibliography. There are numerous instances where I have indicated possible extensions and recumbent studies that could be roused effectively, but which
have swelled this volume unnecessarily. For instance, the last subsection is little more than such indications.