Past exam of the mathematics course of the University of Cambridge 2001 iii Paper 6 4 ii Solution Created 2026-10-03 Updated 2026-10-14
Assume instead that sends weakly compact sets to norm-compact sets. If , then is weakly compact: an open cover has a member containing zero, which contains all but finitely many terms of the convergent sequence. Hence is norm compact. A bounded linear operator is weak-to-weak continuous, because each pulls back to . Thus . If did not tend to zero, a subsequence with norms bounded below by some would have a norm-convergent further subsequence with limit . That further subsequence also converges weakly to both and zero; uniqueness of limits in the Hausdorff weak topology forces , contradicting the lower bound. Therefore , proving the equivalence and the characterization of completely continuous operators.
Now consider the inclusion of the space of continuous functions on a compact space into L2 space for normalized Lebesgue measure. It is a bounded linear operator, since . For a weakly null sequence in , point evaluations are continuous linear functionals, so for every . The Uniform boundedness principle, applied to the canonical embeddings , gives a uniform bound : each dual functional is bounded on the weakly convergent sequence. The dominated convergence theorem now yieldsThus satisfies both equivalent conditions.
It is nevertheless not a compact operator. Over complex scalars the functions lie in the unit ball of and form an orthonormal sequence in , soThere is no norm-convergent subsequence. Over real scalars use , whose distinct images have distance . Complete continuity controls weakly compact sets, rather than all bounded sets.
Past exam of the mathematics course of the University of Cambridge 2001 iii Paper 6 4 i Solution Created 2026-10-03 Updated 2026-10-14
Assume weakly null sequences have norm-null images. Let be any sequence in , where is weakly compact, and choose with . By the weak subsequence result, some . Then , and the assumed property givesThus every sequence in has a norm-convergent subsequence with limit in . In a metric space, sequential compactness is equivalent to compactness. Therefore . This is one characterization of a completely continuous operator.