Gelfand theory for real Banach algebras

Abstract

We are concerned with the development of the more general real case of the classical theorem of Gelfand on representation of a complex commutative unital Banach algebra as an algebra of continuous functions defined on a compact Hausdorff space. To that end, we use only intrinsic methods which do not depend on the complexification of the algebra, and obtain two representation theorems for commutative unital real Banach algebras as algebras of continuous real (respectively, complex) functions on the compact space of real-valued (respectively, complex-valued) $$\mathbb R$$ -algebra homomorphisms.