Past exam of the mathematics course of the University of Cambridge / 2018 / iii / Paper 106 / 3 / b / Solution

By the Riesz-Markov-Kakutani representation theorem, the continuous dual space of $C(K)$ is isometrically the space of finite regular Borel measures, signed for real scalars and complex for complex scalars:Here $|\mu |$ is the variation measure, whose total mass is the total variation norm of a measure.

If $f_n\rightharpoonup 0$ in $C(K)$, evaluation at each $t\in K$ gives $f_n(t)\to 0$. The Uniform boundedness principle also gives $M={\sup }_n\Vert f_n{\Vert }_{\infty }<\infty$. For any $\mu \in M(K)$, the dominated convergence theorem with respect to the finite positive measure $|\mu |$ yieldssince $|f_n(t){|}^2\to 0$ pointwise and $|f_n(t){|}^2\le M^2$. ThusThe same proof works for complex squares, because the absolute-value domination remains valid.