International cooperative research on homogeneous operators

Research Foundation Of The City University Of New York (Lehman), Bronx NY

Investigators

Abstract

Koranyi This award is being co-funded OISE and DMS and will partially support collaborative research between Professor A. Koranyi of CUNY, H H Lehman College, and Professor G. Misra if Indian Institute of Science. The research will focus on homogeneous operators. These form an important class of operators on Hilbert space. Professor G. Misra is the leading expert on them. There are important open questions in the field, such as the classification and explicit description of all homogeneous operators in the Cowen-Douglas class. A. Koranyi and G. Misra have been doing joint research on this problem for the last three years. Two publications have resulted from this, giving a full classification in an important special case and proving various properties. The continuation of this research is expected to lead to a complete classification in the general case and to results about related problems, in particular about dilation theory. After this, it will be attempted to extend at least some of the results to the case of n-tuples of commuting operators associated to bounded symmetric domains. The intellectual merit of the proposal consists in solving some long open problems of operator theory by the combination of ideas from different branches of mathematics. This will constitute substantial progress in operator theory. The broader impacts include advancing operator theory and widely distributing the results in a wy to be useful to all working in the field. This will furnish a method that may have applications in physics and will have a beneficial effect on teaching and research activities both at the CUNY Graduate Center and at the Indian Institute of Science in Bangalore. The project is large enough for students and junior researchers to participate in it.