The twentieth-century view of the analysis of functions is dominated by the study of classes of functions. This volume of the Encyclopaedia covers the origins, development and applications of linear functional analysis, explaining along the way how one is led naturally to the modern approach.

Self-contained, and collating for the first time material that has until now only been published in journals - often in Russian - this book will be of interest to functional analysts, especially those with interests in topological vector spaces, and to algebraists concerned with category theory. The closed graph theorem is one of the corner stones of functional analysis, both as a tool for applications and as an object for research. However, some of the spaces which arise in applications and for which one wants closed graph theorems are not of the type covered by the classical closed graph theorem of Banach or its immediate extensions. To remedy this, mathematicians such as Schwartz and De Wilde (in the West) and Rajkov (in the East) have introduced new ideas which have allowed them to establish closed graph theorems suitable for some of the desired applications. In this book, Professor Smirnov uses category theory to provide a very general framework, including the situations discussed by De Wilde, Rajkov and others. General properties of the spaces involved are discussed and applications are provided in measure theory, global analysis and differential equations.

The twentieth-century view of the analysis of functions is dominated by the study of classes of functions. This volume of the Encyclopaedia covers the origins, development and applications of linear functional analysis, explaining along the way how one is led naturally to the modern approach.