Use the usual unital-subalgebra convention . The spectral theorem for a commutative operator algebra states that the character space , equipped with the Gelfand topology, is a compact Hausdorff space, and there is a unique regular projection-valued measure on its Borel sigma-algebra satisfying
where is the Gelfand transform. The map is an isometric unital star-isomorphism from onto by the Commutative Gelfand--Naimark theorem.
More explicitly, every is an orthogonal projection, , , and for disjoint Borel sets ,
with convergence in the norm of the Hilbert space. Regularity means that each scalar spectral measure is a regular Borel measure. The integral identity then implies . No separability assumption on is needed.
By the Riesz-Markov-Kakutani representation theorem, the continuous dual space of is isometrically the space of finite regular Borel measures, signed for real scalars and complex for complex scalars:
Here is the variation measure, whose total mass is the total variation norm of a measure.
If in , evaluation at each gives . The Uniform boundedness principle also gives . For any , the dominated convergence theorem with respect to the finite positive measure yields
since pointwise and . Thus
The same proof works for complex squares, because the absolute-value domination remains valid.