Past exam of the mathematics course of the University of Cambridge / 2018 / iii / Paper 106 / 2 / a

Use the usual unital-subalgebra convention $I_H\in A$. The spectral theorem for a commutative operator algebra states that the character space ${\Phi }_A$, equipped with the Gelfand topology, is a compact Hausdorff space, and there is a unique regular projection-valued measure $E$ on its Borel sigma-algebra satisfyingwhere $\hat{a}(\chi )=\chi (a)$ is the Gelfand transform. The map $a\mapsto \hat{a}$ is an isometric unital star-isomorphism from $A$ onto $C({\Phi }_A)$ by the Commutative Gelfand--Naimark theorem.

More explicitly, every $E(B)$ is an orthogonal projection, $E(\varnothing )=0$, $E(B\cap C)=E(B)E(C)$, and for disjoint Borel sets $B_n$,with convergence in the norm of the Hilbert space. Regularity means that each scalar spectral measure $B\mapsto ⟨E(B)v,w⟩$ is a regular Borel measure. The integral identity then implies $\Vert a\Vert ={\sup }_{\chi \in {\Phi }_A}|\hat{a}(\chi )|$. No separability assumption on $H$ is needed.