In potential theory, a discipline within applied mathematics, the Furstenberg boundary is a notion of boundary associated with a group. It is named for Harry Furstenberg, who introduced it in a series of papers beginning in 1963 (in the case of semisimple Lie groups). The Furstenberg boundary, roughly speaking, is a universal moduli space for the Poisson integral, expressing a harmonic function on a group in terms of its boundary values.
A model for the Furstenberg boundary is the hyperbolic disc . The classical Poisson formula for a bounded harmonic function on the disc has the form
where P is the Poisson kernel. Any function f on the disc determines a function on the group of Möbius transformations of the disc by setting F(g) = f(g(0)). Then the Poisson formula has the form
where m is the Haar measure on the boundary. This function is then harmonic in the sense that it satisfies the mean-value property with respect to a measure on the Möbius group induced from the usual Lebesgue measure of the disc, suitably normalized. The association of a bounded harmonic function to an (essentially) bounded function on the boundary is one-to-one.
In general, let G be a semi-simple Lie group and μ a probability measure on G that is absolutely continuous. A function f on G is μ-harmonic if it satisfies the mean value property with respect to the measure μ:
There is then a compact space Π, with a G action and measure ν, such that any bounded harmonic function on G is given by
for some bounded function on Π.
The space Π and measure ν depend on the measure μ (and so, what precisely constitutes a harmonic function). However, it turns out that although there are many possibilities for the measure ν (which always depends genuinely on μ), there are only a finite number of spaces Π (up to isomorphism): these are homogeneous spaces of G that are quotients of G by some parabolic subgroup, which can be described completely in terms of root data and a given Iwasawa decomposition. Moreover, there is a maximal such space, with quotient maps going down to all of the other spaces, that is called the Furstenberg boundary.
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In mathematics, singular integral operators of convolution type are the singular integral operators that arise on Rn and Tn through convolution by distributions; equivalently they are the singular integral operators that commute with translations. The classical examples in harmonic analysis are the harmonic conjugation operator on the circle, the Hilbert transform on the circle and the real line, the Beurling transform in the complex plane and the Riesz transforms in Euclidean space. The continuity of these operators on L2 is evident because the Fourier transform converts them into multiplication operators. Continuity on Lp spaces was first established by Marcel Riesz. The classical techniques include the use of Poisson integrals, interpolation theory and the Hardy–Littlewood maximal function. For more general operators, fundamental new techniques, introduced by Alberto Calderón and Antoni Zygmund in 1952, were developed by a number of authors to give general criteria for continuity on Lp spaces. This article explains the theory for the classical operators and sketches the subsequent general theory.
In mathematics, the Douady–Earle extension, named after Adrien Douady and Clifford Earle, is a way of extending homeomorphisms of the unit circle in the complex plane to homeomorphisms of the closed unit disk, such that the extension is a diffeomorphism of the open disk. The extension is analytic on the open disk. The extension has an important equivariance property: if the homeomorphism is composed on either side with a Möbius transformation preserving the unit circle the extension is also obtained by composition with the same Möbius transformation. If the homeomorphism is quasisymmetric, the diffeomorphism is quasiconformal. An extension for quasisymmetric homeomorphisms had previously been given by Lars Ahlfors and Arne Beurling; a different equivariant construction had been given in 1985 by Pekka Tukia. Equivariant extensions have important applications in Teichmüller theory; for example, they lead to a quick proof of the contractibility of the Teichmüller space of a Fuchsian group.
In mathematics, the Radó–Kneser–Choquet theorem, named after Tibor Radó, Hellmuth Kneser and Gustave Choquet, states that the Poisson integral of a homeomorphism of the unit circle is a harmonic diffeomorphism of the open unit disk. The result was stated as a problem by Radó and solved shortly afterwards by Kneser in 1926. Choquet, unaware of the work of Radó and Kneser, rediscovered the result with a different proof in 1945. Choquet also generalized the result to the Poisson integral of a homeomorphism from the unit circle to a simple Jordan curve bounding a convex region.
In mathematics, singular integral operators on closed curves arise in problems in analysis, in particular complex analysis and harmonic analysis. The two main singular integral operators, the Hilbert transform and the Cauchy transform, can be defined for any smooth Jordan curve in the complex plane and are related by a simple algebraic formula. In the special case of Fourier series for the unit circle, the operators become the classical Cauchy transform, the orthogonal projection onto Hardy space, and the Hilbert transform a real orthogonal linear complex structure. In general the Cauchy transform is a non-self-adjoint idempotent and the Hilbert transform a non-orthogonal complex structure. The range of the Cauchy transform is the Hardy space of the bounded region enclosed by the Jordan curve. The theory for the original curve can be deduced from that of the unit circle, where, because of rotational symmetry, both operators are classical singular integral operators of convolution type. The Hilbert transform satisfies the jump relations of Plemelj and Sokhotski, which express the original function as the difference between the boundary values of holomorphic functions on the region and its complement. Singular integral operators have been studied on various classes of functions, including Hőlder spaces, Lp spaces and Sobolev spaces. In the case of L2 spaces—the case treated in detail below—other operators associated with the closed curve, such as the Szegő projection onto Hardy space and the Neumann–Poincaré operator, can be expressed in terms of the Cauchy transform and its adjoint.
In mathematics, the Poisson boundary is a measure space associated to a random walk. It is an object designed to encode the asymptotic behaviour of the random walk, i.e. how trajectories diverge when the number of steps goes to infinity. Despite being called a boundary it is in general a purely measure-theoretical object and not a boundary in the topological sense. However, in the case where the random walk is on a topological space the Poisson boundary can be related to the Martin boundary which is an analytic construction yielding a genuine topological boundary. Both boundaries are related to harmonic functions on the space via generalisations of the Poisson formula.