Monthly Archives: May 2019

Course Review: MATH 421

Real Analysis II

“If everyone is getting closer together, and you are going to Cleveland, then everyone’s going to Cleveland!”

Text: Real Analysis: Modern Techniques and Their Applications by Gerald B. Folland

Prof: Dr Brian Marcus

Prof Marcus is one of the kindest professors I know. He also explains each concept from multiple perspectives and breaks the concepts down to simple intuition. His notes are super useful and he has a great sense of humor.

Difficulty

The classes moves somewhat slower then 420, so we went a lot more deeper into the details of certain proofs and where they come from. This meant the classes were easier to follow (and in my view more enjoyable!). Further the homework was largely straightforward. The one challenge in this course was the material towards the latter half of the term was slightly more complex and were not assessed on homework. We also may not have covered the material generally covered in a similar course.


Key Concepts

Banach spaces

Hilbert spaces

Linear functionals

Hahn Banach Theorem

Open mapping theorem

Uniform boundedness

Riesz representation theorems

Hard Concepts

Weak Convergence: Can be hard to think about neighborhoods in this topology.

Hilbert Spaces: There are a lot of nifty tricks in Hilbert spaces that are not immediately obvious, and do not work in other spaces.

Conclusion

Really fun course and learnt a lot. Nice conclusion to my studies of analysis in some sense.