2 February 2016
Professor Anthony To-Ming Lau, University of Alberta, Edmonton,has been appointed as a Distinguished Faculty Visitor to the Department.

As part of this appointment, Professor Lau will visit the Department from Monday 16th to Friday 27th May 2016.

He will give lectures on the topic "Introduction to the Fourier and Fourier Stieltjes algebras of a locally compact group" in the Lecture Theatre (A54) of the Postgraduate Statistics Centre at the following times:

  • Wednesday 18th May 2016 – 11am to 12pm
  • Thursday 19th May 2016 – 2pm to 3pm
  • Friday 20th May 2016 – 10am to 11am
  • Friday 20th May 2016 – 2pm to 3pm

He will also give a Department Colloquium on Wednesday 25th May at 2pm, with the title "Finite dimensional invariant subspace properties". All are welcome.

A summary of the lectures is as follows:

"In this series of four talks, I shall introduce the Fourier algebra A(G) and the Fourier-Stieltjes algebras B(G) of a locally compact group G, as well as the group von Neumann algebra VN(G) which can be identified with the dual space of A(G). In the case of a locally compact abelian group G, A(G) and B(G) can be identified with the group algebra L1(G) and the measure algebra M(G^) of the dual group of G. The talks will assume a knowledge of graduate-level functional analysis."