Past exam of the mathematics course of the University of Cambridge 2004 iii Paper 10 3 iii Solution Created 2026-10-03 Updated 2026-10-14
If , part (ii) makes invertible for every nonzero scalar . Thus and : it is a quasinilpotent element. Conversely, let be a two-sided ideal consisting of quasinilpotent elements. For and , has spectrum , so is invertible. Part (ii) implies . This proves is the greatest ideal contained in the quasinilpotent set, the Jacobson radical as greatest quasinilpotent ideal characterization.
A semisimple Banach algebra is one with . For , its natural action on is faithful and algebraically irreducible. Indeed, given and any , the Hahn-Banach theorem gives a bounded functional with . The rank-one operator then maps to . Any invariant subspace containing consequently contains every . The faithful representation has kernel zero, so zero is primitive and is semisimple.
Nevertheless, choose a nonzero bounded functional and , possible when . The nonzero rank-one operator satisfies . Hence and , although . This proves the quasinilpotent set of is not ; it is not the same as the radical.
For infinite-dimensional , the finite-rank operators form a nonzero proper two-sided ideal: products with bounded operators are finite-rank, and the identity has infinite rank. Thus zero is not maximal. Even if maximal ideals are required to be closed, the compact operators give a nonzero proper closed ideal containing the finite-rank operators. The identity is not compact on an infinite-dimensional Banach space, since the Riesz lemma supplies a bounded sequence with pairwise distances bounded below. Therefore zero is primitive but not maximal in infinite dimension.
Past exam of the mathematics course of the University of Cambridge 2008 iii Paper 1 1 b Solution Created 2026-10-03 Updated 2026-10-14
For a finite-rank operator , define and its trace norm bywhere are its nonzero singular values, counted with multiplicity. The finite-rank spectral theorem gives orthonormal systems with , where .
For every bounded operator ,Choose the contraction taking to and vanishing on their orthogonal complement. It attains equality, soThis formula proves the triangle inequality and absolute homogeneity. Also , so vanishing of the trace norm forces . Thus it is a norm on the vector space of finite-rank operators.
The map , where , is a bounded linear map into the dual of this normed space. Its norm is at most . Rank-one tests give the reverse inequality: and , so taking unit vectors gives .
Conversely, let be a bounded linear functional for the trace norm. The sesquilinear form satisfiesThe Riesz representation theorem gives a unique bounded operator with , and . Since every finite-rank operator is a finite sum of rank-one operators, linearity implies for every . HenceThe same identification extends to the completion, the trace-class operators. This is trace-class duality; completeness of the original finite-rank space is not required to identify its bounded dual.
Past exam of the mathematics course of the University of Cambridge 2008 iii Paper 1 1 c Solution Created 2026-10-03 Updated 2026-10-14
For an orthonormal basis , define the Hilbert-Schmidt norm by . For a possibly uncountable basis, the nonnegative sum means the supremum over finite subsets. Parseval's identity gives, for any other orthonormal basis ,Changing the domain basis in the last expression proves basis independence. Polarization gives a basis-independent inner productwith the same first-argument linear convention. The sums converge by the Cauchy-Schwarz inequality. The operator-norm bound follows by applying Cauchy-Schwarz to the coordinates of a unit vector.
To prove completeness, let be Cauchy in this norm. The operator-norm bound gives a bounded-operator limit . For a finite subset of the basis,For large , the right side is uniformly small by the Cauchy property. Taking the supremum over shows is Hilbert-Schmidt and ; it also shows is Hilbert-Schmidt. Thus the Hilbert-Schmidt operators form a Hilbert space. Finite-rank operators are dense there: keeping finitely many basis columns makes the sum of omitted squared column norms tend to zero. The operator-norm bound then shows that every Hilbert-Schmidt operator is compact.
Now let be a strongly continuous unitary representation of the compact metric group , as is standard for a representation of a topological group. Fix and average the positive rank-one operator :The integrand is continuous in the Hilbert-Schmidt norm, so this Bochner integral exists in the complete space just proved. Normalized Haar measure and invariance show that is positive, compact and commutes with every . Moreover,the integrand is positive near the identity and every nonempty open set has positive Haar measure. Thus . A nonzero eigenspace is finite-dimensional and invariant under , by (a). Within it choose a nonzero invariant subspace of smallest dimension; it is irreducible. Its orthogonal complement is invariant because the representation is unitary, so the finite-dimensional space splits into irreducibles.
Take a maximal orthogonal family of such finite-dimensional irreducible invariant subspaces. If their closed span had a nonzero orthogonal complement, the same averaging argument on that complement would produce another member, contradicting maximality. ThereforeThis compact averaging of a rank-one operator argument does not require itself to be separable. Strong continuity is the topological representation hypothesis used in the averaging step.
Past exam of the mathematics course of the University of Cambridge 2024 iii Paper 225 1 b Solution Created 2026-09-24 Updated 2026-09-25
Write for the rank-one operator . The estimator is the kernel representation of the empirical covariance operatorSince ,Thus the estimator has the fixed bias of an estimator for .
The fourth-moment assumption makes square-integrable in the Hilbert space of Hilbert-Schmidt operators. The weak law of large numbers therefore givesConsequently consistency for holds exactly when . More precisely, if , thenThe Hilbert-space central limit theorem also yieldswhere is a centered Gaussian random element in the Hilbert-Schmidt operator space with covariance determined by . Relative to , the same fluctuation is displaced by and hence does not have a finite centered limit when .
Past exam of the mathematics course of the University of Cambridge 2025 iii Paper 106 3 c Solution Created 2026-09-24 Updated 2026-09-25
Factor as in part b(v). Then Parseval identity for a Hilbertian basis and Cauchy-Schwarz inequality giveThe defining series for the operator trace is therefore absolutely convergent and satisfies .
For unit vectors , the adjoint operator of is , andHence and part b(iii), followed by Parseval, givesScaling proves . A second use of Parseval yieldswhich proves the asserted rank-one operator formulas.
Trace-class duality 2026-10-14
The dual of the trace-class operators, and also of the normed space of finite-rank operators with the trace norm, is isometrically the space of bounded operators. The pairing is . For , one has and , using an inner product linear in its first argument. A bounded functional on these rank-one operators gives a bounded sesquilinear form and hence a unique by the Riesz representation theorem. The singular value decomposition proves and the triangle inequality for the trace norm.