I’m stumped– you give it a try
I’m going to add problems as I get stumped.
- A bilinear functional on a hilbert space is said to be elementary if there are vectors
such that
Suppose
are linearly independent vectors, what are necessary and sufficient conditions on
so that
is elementary? - Let
be a family of mutually commuting operators. Then there is a common Schur basis for
– that is, there exists a unitary
such that for all
,
is upper triangular. - The elementary tensors
, with all factors equal, are all in the subspace
. Do they span it? - If
, then
,
and
. In terms of an orthonormal basis of
, write an element of 
On the 4th question, I could construct one such element, but I’m trying to get the form of a general element. I’m stuck on finding a basis for
– so far I know
are in it if
aren’t distinct, and
are in it if
are distinct–, and I imagine finding a basis for
is even more painful.
Possibly relevant posts:
- Inner products (6/7/2006)
- Dr. Singh’s Take on the Fourier Unicity Theorem (via Invariant Subspaces) (6/17/2005)
- Another sign matrix problem (3/26/2010)
For the first of these, it may help to notice this:
If (x,u)(y,v)+(z,u)(w,v)=(a,u)(b,v), then, for all u,v,
((a,u)b, v) = ((x,u)y + (z,u)w, v)
and
((b,v)a, u) = ((y,v)x + (w,v)z, u).
Therefore,
(a,u)b = (x,u)y + (z,u)w
and
(b,v)a = (y,v)x + (w,v)z.
If a and b are nonzero, then the first of these two shows that if u is perpendicular to both x and z, then it’s also perpendicular to a. So a=Ax+Bz. Similarly, b=Cy+Dw. It shouldn’t be too bad from here.
Thanks for the idea, George.