Past exam of the mathematics course of the University of Cambridge 2016 iii Paper 106 5 iv Solution Created 2026-10-03 Updated 2026-10-06
Weak compactness of the adjoint forces weak compactness of the original operator. Assume is weakly compact. Apply the already proved to this operator, rather than assuming the adjoint equivalence in advance. It givesTake annihilating , so for every . Write for some . For every ,Hence and . It follows thatfor every annihilating .
The vector subspace is closed in the norm topology in because is complete and is an isometry. The Hahn-Banach theorem says that any point outside a closed linear subspace can be separated from it by a bounded linear functional vanishing on that subspace. Applying this in shows that an element annihilated by all such must belong to . Therefore for every , proving . The reverse implications above now establish all four equivalences, including weak compactness of an operator and its adjoint:
Finally, if is a reflexive Banach space, every is for some , and . If is a reflexive Banach space, , so the same range condition holds automatically. In either case, proves