Mr. President, ladies and gentlemen, I have had great pleasure in accepting the invitation to deliver this tenth Jeffery-Williams lecture. As one of that generation who were strongly influenced by Ralph Jeffery and Lloyd Williams, I also appreciate the challenge of maintaining the high standard that these lectures named in their honour have established. May I also say that the lecture earlier this morning by Professor Dieudonnè was certainly fortunate for us.

The problem of establishing oscillation and non-oscillation criteria for elliptic equations has recently been considered by several authors. Extensive bibliographies may be found in the books by C. A. Swanson, [7], and by K. Kreith, [3].

Most of the interest has so far centered on equations of second order with some results also established for fourth order equations. Non-oscillation theorems for higher order equations have recently been established by the author, [1], and by Noussair and Yoshida, [5]. In particular, both in [1] and [5], Kneser-type theorems were established for classes of higher order elliptic equations.

The theory of almost everywhere convergence has its roots in the poineering work of A. Kolmogorov, and today it constitutes one of the most captivating and challenging chapters in modern probability theory and analysis. Whereas some modes of convergence for sequences of measurable functions, e.g. convergence in norm, can be readily obtained by an intelligent exploitation of the various properties of the function spaces involved, a.e. convergence invariably requires a rather high, and sometimes surprising, degree of mathematical virtuosity.

It has long been the practice in the theory of Hilbert spaces to use the Fourier series expansion (i.e. the Levy inversion formula) for the resolution of the identity associated with a unitary operator to obtain results for this operator, and hence for any power bounded invertible operator on such spaces since they are necessarily isomorphic to unitary operators [5, p. 1945]. Though many important power bounded operators on Banach spaces are not spectral [6, p. 1045-1051] the approach of this paper permits us to deduce for such operators results similar to those known for spectral operators.

Let Z(Z+) denote the set of all (positive) integers and let T denote the discrete Hilbert transform defined for suitable sequences a = {ak}kϵz by

where as usual the prime denotes omission of the term k = n.

Suppose throughout that s, an (n = 0,1,2,…) are arbitrary complex numbers, that α > 0 and β is real and that N is a non-negative integer such that αN + β≥1. Let

Throughout this article p denotes a fixed number such that 1 ≤ p < ∞. The definition of a real Lp space associated with a measure space is well known. These spaces are Banach Spaces and, with the usual partial ordering of (equivalence classes of) functions, also Banach Lattices.

Lie algebras, in the form of algebras of observables, play an essential role in the formulation of classical and quantum mechanics. We discuss whether lie groups play a similar role in general relativity through the holonomy group. We also explore what interrelations these ideas provide between classical physics, relativity and quantum physics.

We give a simpler proof to a theorem of L. A. Karlovitz that the dual of a flat Banach space is flat, and also study some geometric properties of the dual space.

The following theorem is a widely used corollary of the Thorn-Riesz convexity theorem ([1], pp. 526).

Theorem. Let (Ω, a, μ) be a positive measure space, and let

be a linear operator with ‖T‖1≤1, ‖T‖∞≤1. Then ‖T‖p≤1, 1≤p≤∞

Associated with any near-ring R, and any set S of distributive elements of R, one has a natural notion of S-distributive R-modules, analogous to that of modules over rings and including the latter as special case (Frohlich [6]; we recall the details in Section 1). Since near-rings can be viewed as slightly deficient rings, it makes sense to enquire whether such near-ring modules share with modules over rings the familiar and important property of having injective hulls.

Let G be a collineation group of a projective plane π. Let E be the subgroup generated by all elations in G. In the case that π is finite and G fixes no point or line, F. Piper [6; 7] has proved that if G contains certain combinations of perspectivities, then E is isomorphic to for some finite field g.

Leeming [4] has defined a sequence of polynomials {Q4n(x)} and a sequence of integers {Q4n} by means of

1

and

2

Thus

3

Leeming showed that the Q4n are all odd and that

4

It is proved in [3] that

5

In this paper the congruence (f ∘ g)(n) = 0 (mod n) and the functional equation f ∘ f ∘ … ∘ f = g, are studied, where ∘ is an exponential regular convolution.

A ring or near-ring R is called periodic if for each xϵR, there exist distinct positive integers n, m for which xn = xm. A well-known theorem of Herstein states that a periodic ring is commutative if its nilpotent elements are central [5], and Ligh [6] has asked whether a similar result holds for distributively-generated (d-g) near-rings. It is the purpose of this note to provide an affirmative answer.

The investigations reported in this paper were prompted by a remark by A. M. Krall in [2] that certain functional which appear in the boundary conditions of the system adjoint to a given linear differential boundary value problem seem artificial in that setting.

Sufficient conditions are given for the error norm and coefficients of best rational Chebyshev approximation on a domain to depend continuously on the domain. Examples of discontinuity are given.

We obtain mainly by using Jensen's inequality for convex functions an integral inequality, which contains as a special case Shun's generalization of Hardy's inequality.

In this paper, we study the behaviour of singular isometries in orthogonal groups. These are isometries whose path is a singular subspace. We shall prove that the path of such a singular isometry is always even-dimensional. We shall use this result to show that the subgroup of the orthogonal group On(K, Q) which is generated by the singular isometries is the commutator subgroup Ωn(K, Q).

Let be the density of thinnest k-fold covering of the plane by equal circles (of radius 1, say). Let Dk be the corresponding density when the centres of the circles are at the points of a lattice Λ. It is clear that