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Inmathematics – specifically, inoperator theory – adensely defined operator orpartially defined operator is a type of partially definedfunction. In atopological sense, it is alinear operator that is defined "almost everywhere". Densely defined operators often arise infunctional analysis as operations that one would like to apply to a larger class of objects than those for which theya priori "make sense".[clarification needed]
Aclosed operator that is used in practice is often densely defined.
Let betopological vector spaces.
Adensely defined linear operator from to is a linear operator of type, such that is adense subset of. In other words, is apartial function whosedomain is dense in.
Sometimes this is abbreviated as when the context makes it clear that might not be defined for all of.
Closed Graph Theorem—If are Hausdorff and metrizable, is densely defined, with continuous inverse, then is closed. That is, the set is closed in theproduct topology of.
Take anynet in with in. By continuity of,. Hence there exists some such that, and.
TheHausdorff property ensures sequential convergence is unique. Themetrizability property ensures thatsequentially closed sets are closed. In functional analysis, these conditions typically hold, as most spaces under consideration areFréchet space, or stronger than Fréchet. In particular,Banach spaces are Fréchet.
Let be theHilbert space ofsquare-summable sequences, with orthonormal basis. Define thediagonal operatorwith domainThen is dense in because thefinitely supported sequences, and is dense in. The operator is closed andunbounded, since.
There exists a bounded inverse:Hence is bijective with bounded inverse, so and, by theNeumann series argument, theresolvent set of contains the open unit disk.
In fact, the spectrum of (that is, the complement of its resolvent set) is precisely the set of positive integers, since for any, the diagonal formuladefines a bounded operator.
Thus, is a densely defined, closed, unbounded operator with bounded inverse and nontrivial, unbounded spectrum.
Consider the space of allreal-valued,continuous functions defined on the unit interval; let denote the subspace consisting of allcontinuously differentiable functions. Equip with thesupremum norm; this makes into a realBanach space. Thedifferentiation operator given by is a linear operator defined on the dense linear subspace, therefore it is a operator densely defined on.
The operator is an example of anunbounded linear operator, sinceThis unboundedness causes problems if one wishes to somehow continuously extend the differentiation operator to the whole of
ThePaley–Wiener integral is a standard example of acontinuous extension of a densely defined operator.
In anyabstract Wiener space withadjoint there is a naturalcontinuous linear operator (in fact it is the inclusion, and is anisometry) from to under which goes to theequivalence class of in It can be shown that is dense in Since the above inclusion is continuous, there is a unique continuous linear extension of the inclusion to the whole of This extension is the Paley–Wiener map.