# Metric approach to limit operators V

In the previous post I sketched out the condensation of singularities argument which finishes the proof under the assumption that the underlying metric space $$X$$ is a group.  In this case all limit operators act on the same Hilbert space, namely $$\ell^2(X)$$, and the weak compactness of the set of all limit operators plays a critical role.

In the more general situation described by Spakula and Willett, each limit operator (say at a boundary point $$\omega$$) acts on its own Hilbert space $$\ell^2(X(\omega))$$.   In order to bring this situation under sufficient control to continue to make the weak compactness argument, we are going to need some kind of bundle theory. Continue reading

# Metric approach to limit operators IV

In this post I’ll finally get to the “condensation of singularities” argument that was invented by Lindner and Seidel in the (free abelian) group context and generalized by Spakula and Willett to metric spaces.  (Calling this “condensation of singularities” is my idea, but it does seem to me to get at what is going on.  I can’t help feeling that there should be a way of replacing some of the explicit constructions with an abstract argument involving the Baire category theorem.  But I have not yet been able to come up with one.) Continue reading

# Metric approach to limit operators III

This is a continuation of my posts on the Spakula-Willett paper Metric approach to limit operators (see part I and part II).  In this post I will talk about “lower norm witnesses” on spaces with property A.  (This is quite close to what is done in my earlier post here, though using direct geometric tools rather than the functional analysis tricks I suggested, which only work in the Hilbert space case.)  Then in the next post I will talk about the “condensation of singularities” argument that completes the proof. Continue reading

# A correction to EOTAM

In my book Elliptic operators, topology and asymptotic methods (both the first and the second editions) I give a discussion of the representation theory of the groups Spin and Pin which was based (as far as I can now remember) on some notes that I took when I attended Adams’ famous course on the exceptional Lie groups, as a Part III student in 1981.  I no longer seem to have those, unfortunately (although meanwhile a version of Adams’ own notes on his approach has been published by University of Chicago Press).  Meanwhile, in 2010 Darij Grinberg pointed out on Math Overflow that the argument I gave was garbled: see this link.  In this post I want to explain what is garbled and how the useful part of the argument can be recovered.  Continue reading

# Metric approach to limit operators II

Following on from my earlier post on the Spakula-Willett paper, let my try to summarize sections 5 and 6.  These parts produce, for their generalized notion of limit operator, an equivalent of how the classical limit operator theory looked prior to the Lindner-Seidel paper earlier this year.

Thus the main result of these parts is the following Theorem: A band dominated operator is Fredholm if and only if all its limit operators are invertible and there is a uniform bound on the norms of the inverses of all the limit operators. Continue reading