Hahn-Banach theorem
The Hahn-Banach theorem is a foundational result in functionalanalysis
. Roughly speaking, it asserts the existence of a greatvariety
of bounded (and hence continuous
) linear functionals
on annormed vector space
, even if that space happens to beinfinite-dimensional. We first consider anabstract version of this theorem
, and then give the more classicalresult as a corollary.
Let be a real, or a complex vector space, with denoting the corresponding field of scalars, and let
be a seminorm on .
Theorem 1
Let be a linear functional defined on a subspace. If the restricted functional
satisfies
then it can be extended to all of without violating the aboveproperty. To be more precise, there exists a linear functional such that
Definition 2
We say that a linear functional is bounded ifthere exists a bound such that
(1) |
If is a bounded linear functional, we define , thenorm of , according to
One can show that is the infimum of all the possible that satisfy (1)
Theorem 3 (Hahn-Banach)
Let be a bounded linear functional defined on a subspace. Let denote the norm of relativeto the restricted seminorm on . Then there exists a boundedextension with the same norm, i.e.