HOMOMORPHISMS OF BANACH ALGEBRAS WITH RANGE IN C1[0, 1

Abstract

Many commutative semisimple Banach algebras B including B = C (X), X compact, and B = L1 (G), G locally compact, have the property that every homomorphism from B into C1[0, 1] is compact. In this paper we consider this property for uniform algebras. Several examples of homomorphisms from somewhat complicated algebras of analytic functions to C1[0, 1] are shown to be compact. This, together with the fact that every homomorphism from the disc algebra and from the algebra H∞ (∆), ∆ = unit disc, to C1[0, 1] is compact, led to the conjecture that perhaps every homomorphism from a uniform algebra into C1[0, 1] is compact. The main result to which we devote the second half of this paper, is to construct a compact Hausdorff space X, a uniformly closed subalgebra [Formula: see text] of C (X), and an arc ϕ: [0, 1] → X such that the transformation T defined by Tf = f ◦ ϕ is a (bounded) homomorphism of [Formula: see text] into C1[0, 1] which is not compact.