Are you an EPFL student looking for a semester project?
Work with us on data science and visualisation projects, and deploy your project as an app on top of GraphSearch.
Concept
Hilbert space
Summary
In mathematics, Hilbert spaces (named after David Hilbert) allow the methods of linear algebra and calculus to be generalized from (finite-dimensional) Euclidean vector spaces to spaces that may be infinite-dimensional. Hilbert spaces arise naturally and frequently in mathematics and physics, typically as function spaces. Formally, a Hilbert space is a vector space equipped with an inner product that induces a distance function for which the space is a complete metric space.
The earliest Hilbert spaces were studied from this point of view in the first decade of the 20th century by David Hilbert, Erhard Schmidt, and Frigyes Riesz. They are indispensable tools in the theories of partial differential equations, quantum mechanics, Fourier analysis (which includes applications to signal processing and heat transfer), and ergodic theory (which forms the mathematical underpinning of thermodynamics). John von Neumann coined the term Hilbert space for the abstract concept that underlies many of these diverse applications. The success of Hilbert space methods ushered in a very fruitful era for functional analysis. Apart from the classical Euclidean vector spaces, examples of Hilbert spaces include spaces of square-integrable functions, spaces of sequences, Sobolev spaces consisting of generalized functions, and Hardy spaces of holomorphic functions.
Geometric intuition plays an important role in many aspects of Hilbert space theory. Exact analogs of the Pythagorean theorem and parallelogram law hold in a Hilbert space. At a deeper level, perpendicular projection onto a linear subspace or a subspace (the analog of "dropping the altitude" of a triangle) plays a significant role in optimization problems and other aspects of the theory. An element of a Hilbert space can be uniquely specified by its coordinates with respect to an orthonormal basis, in analogy with Cartesian coordinates in classical geometry. When this basis is countably infinite, it allows identifying the Hilbert space with the space of the infinite sequences that are square-summable.
Official source
About this result
This page is automatically generated and may contain information that is not correct, complete, up-to-date, or relevant to your search query. The same applies to every other page on this website. Please make sure to verify the information with EPFL's official sources.
Related MOOCs (14)
Algebra (part 1)
Un MOOC francophone d'algèbre linéaire accessible à tous, enseigné de manière rigoureuse et ne nécessitant aucun prérequis.
Algebra (part 1)
Un MOOC francophone d'algèbre linéaire accessible à tous, enseigné de manière rigoureuse et ne nécessitant aucun prérequis.
Algebra (part 2)
Un MOOC francophone d'algèbre linéaire accessible à tous, enseigné de manière rigoureuse et ne nécessitant aucun prérequis.