Choquet theory

In mathematics, Choquet theory, named after Gustave Choquet, is an area of functional analysis and convex analysis concerned with measures which have support on the extreme points of a convex set C. Roughly speaking, every vector of C should appear as a weighted average of extreme points, a concept made more precise by generalizing the notion of weighted average from a convex combination to an integral taken over the set E of extreme points. Here C is a subset of a real vector space V, and the main thrust of the theory is to treat the cases where V is an infinite-dimensional (locally convex Hausdorff) topological vector space along lines similar to the finite-dimensional case. The main concerns of Gustave Choquet were in potential theory. Choquet theory has become a general paradigm, particularly for treating convex cones as determined by their extreme rays, and so for many different notions of positivity in mathematics. The two ends of a line segment determine the points in between: in vector terms the segment from v to w consists of the λv + (1 − λ)w with 0 ≤ λ ≤ 1. The classical result of Hermann Minkowski says that in Euclidean space, a bounded, closed convex set C is the convex hull of its extreme point set E, so that any c in C is a (finite) convex combination of points e of E. Here E may be a finite or an infinite set. In vector terms, by assigning non-negative weights w(e) to the e in E, almost all 0, we can represent any c in C as with In any case the w(e) give a probability measure supported on a finite subset of E. For any affine function f on C, its value at the point c is In the infinite dimensional setting, one would like to make a similar statement. Choquet's theorem states that for a compact convex subset C of a normed space V, given c in C there exists a probability measure w supported on the set E of extreme points of C such that, for any affine function f on C, In practice V will be a Banach space. The original Krein–Milman theorem follows from Choquet's result.