Hahn–Banach theorem

The Hahn–Banach theorem is a central tool in functional analysis. It allows the extension of bounded linear functionals defined on a subspace of some vector space to the whole space, and it also shows that there are "enough" continuous linear functionals defined on every normed vector space to make the study of the dual space "interesting". Another version of the Hahn–Banach theorem is known as the Hahn–Banach separation theorem or the hyperplane separation theorem, and has numerous uses in convex geometry. The theorem is named for the mathematicians Hans Hahn and Stefan Banach, who proved it independently in the late 1920s. The special case of the theorem for the space of continuous functions on an interval was proved earlier (in 1912) by Eduard Helly, and a more general extension theorem, the M. Riesz extension theorem, from which the Hahn–Banach theorem can be derived, was proved in 1923 by Marcel Riesz. The first Hahn–Banach theorem was proved by Eduard Helly in 1921 who showed that certain linear functionals defined on a subspace of a certain type of normed space () had an extension of the same norm. Helly did this through the technique of first proving that a one-dimensional extension exists (where the linear functional has its domain extended by one dimension) and then using induction. In 1927, Hahn defined general Banach spaces and used Helly's technique to prove a norm-preserving version of Hahn–Banach theorem for Banach spaces (where a bounded linear functional on a subspace has a bounded linear extension of the same norm to the whole space). In 1929, Banach, who was unaware of Hahn's result, generalized it by replacing the norm-preserving version with the dominated extension version that uses sublinear functions. Whereas Helly's proof used mathematical induction, Hahn and Banach both used transfinite induction. The Hahn–Banach theorem arose from attempts to solve infinite systems of linear equations.