NOTES Edited by William Adkins Eigenvalues, Almost Periodic Functions, and the Derivative of an Integral Mark Finkelstein and Robert Whitley In [4], examples are given of functions g(x), bounded and continuous on (0, l], for which the indefinite integral g(t) dt is not differentiable from the right at zero. The purpose of this note is to show that such examples arise in a natural way and that the class of such examples is quite large. First, to see how such examples can come up, consider the operator l; Hf(x) = - I x 1x f (t) dt. A result due to Hardy [S, Equation 9.9.1 ], (7, Exercise 8.14] asserts that His a bounded linear operator on the Banach space LP[O, 1] for p > I with norm less than or equal to p/(p - 1). Actually Hardy gives the result for LP[O, oo), but it is somewhat simpler to work with LP[O, I]. Considering the function f(x) = x 0 (a real), which is in U[O, 1] when a > - 1/ p, computing Hf (x) , and letting a -4 - 1/ p shows that Hardy's bound for the norm of H is sharp and also shows that H is unbounded on L 1 (0, 1 ]. The case p = oo is a limiting case in which the norm of H is one. In working with the function f(x) = x 0 of the preceding paragraph, it will not have escaped the reader's notice that this function is an eigenfunction for H with eigenvalue 1/(1 +a). A basic operator theory question is: What are the eigenvalues of H? If A. is a nonzero eigenvalue with associated eigenvector f, then 11x f(t) dt x = A.f(x) , where equality holds almost everywhere. But equation (1) shows that f is absolutely continuous on (0, I], and ( 1) can be taken to hold not just almost everywhere but for all x in (0, l]. That is, a continuous f satisfying (l) for all x in (0, 1] can be chosen from the equivalence class of functions in LP[O, 1] that satisfy (1) almost everywhere. It is legitimate to differentiate equation (1) and, by rearranging, to get A.xj'(x) +(A. - l)f(x) = 0, which is an Euler differential equation [2, chap. 4, sec. 2] on (0, 1]. A priori (2) also holds only almost everywhere, but on solving for f' we see, as earlier, that a continuous representative from the equivalence class of f' can be chosen so that (2) holds for all x in (0, l]. It bas solutions of the form f(x) = xf3, where f3 =a+ ib, with f in LP [0, L] if a > -1 / p > - 1. The associated eigenvalue is A. = 1 / (1 + {3). It is immediate from (1) that the eigenfunction f is continuous at 0 (from the right, since f has domain [0, 1]) if and only if F (x) = f (t) dt is differentiable (from the right) at zero, and this occurs exactly when a > 0. l; August-September 2005] NOTES
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