Lp space
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In mathematics, the Lp and
spaces are spaces of p-power integrable functions, and corresponding sequence spaces. They are sometimes called Lebesgue spaces, named after Henri Lebesgue (Dunford & Schwartz 1958, III.3). They form an important class of examples of Banach spaces in functional analysis, and of topological vector spaces. Lebesgue spaces have applications in physics, statistics, finance, engineering, and other disciplines.
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[edit] Motivation
Consider the real vector space Rn. The sum of vectors in Rn is given by
and the scalar action is given by
The length of a vector
is usually given by
but this is by no means the only way of defining length. If p is a real number, p ≥ 1, define
for any vector
. It turns out that this definition indeed satisfies the properties of a "length function" (or norm), which are that only the zero vector has zero length, the length of the vector changes (modulus-)linearly when we multiply it by a scalar, and the length of the sum of two vectors is no larger than the sum of lengths of the vectors (triangle inequality). For any p ≥ 1, Rn together with the p-norm just defined becomes a Banach space.
[edit] ℓp spaces
The above p-norm can be extended to vectors having an infinite number of components, yielding the space
. For
an infinite sequence of real (or complex) numbers, define the vector sum to be
while the scalar action is given by
Define the p-norm
Here, a complication arises, namely that the series on the right is not always convergent, so for example, the sequence made up of only ones,
will have an infinite p-norm (length) for every finite p ≥ 1. The space
is then defined as the set of all infinite sequences of real (or complex) numbers such that the p-norm is finite.
One can check that as p increases, the set
grows larger. For example, the sequence
is not in
, but it is in
for p>1, as the series
diverges for p=1 (the harmonic series), but is convergent for p>1.
One also defines the ∞-norm as
and the corresponding space
of all bounded sequences. It turns out that
if the right-hand side is finite, or the left-hand side is infinite. Thus, we will consider
spaces for 1≤p≤∞.
The p-norm thus defined on
is indeed a norm, and
together with this norm is a Banach space. The fully general Lp space is obtained — as seen below — by considering vectors, not only with finitely or countably-infinitely many components, but with arbitrarily many components; in other words, functions. An integral instead of a sum is used to define the p-norm.
[edit] Properties of ℓp spaces
The space
is the only
space that is a Hilbert space, since any norm that is induced by an inner product should satisfy the parallelogram identity
. Substituting two distinct unit vectors in for x and y directly shows that the identity is not true unless p = 2.
The
, 1 < p < ∞ spaces are reflexive:
, where (1/p) + (1/q) = 1.
The dual of c0 is
; the dual of
is
. For the case of natural numbers index set, the
and c0 are separable, with the sole exception of
. Here, c0 is defined as the space of all sequences converging to zero, with norm identical to ||x||∞. The dual of
is the ba space.
The
spaces can be embedded into many Banach spaces. The question of whether all Banach spaces have such an embedding was answered negatively by B. S. Tsirelson's construction of Tsirelson space in 1974.
Except for the trivial finite case, an unusual feature of
is that it is not polynomially reflexive.
[edit] Lp spaces
Let 1 ≤ p < ∞ and (S, μ) be a measure space. Consider the set of all measurable functions from S to C (or R) whose absolute value raised to the p-th power has a finite Lebesgue integral, or equivalently, that
The set of such functions form a vector space, with the following natural operations:
and, for a scalar λ,
That the sum of two pth power integrable functions is again pth power integrable follows from the inequality |f + g|p ≤ 2p (|f|p + |g|p). In fact, more is true. Minkowski's inequality says the triangle inequality holds for 
Thus the set of pth power integrable functions, together with the function
, is a seminormed vector space, which we denote by 
This can be made into a normed vector space in a standard way; one simply takes the quotient space with respect to the kernel of ||·||p. Since ||f||p = 0 if and only if f = 0 almost everywhere, in the quotient space two functions f and g are identified if f = g almost everywhere. The resulting normed vector space is, by definition,
For p = ∞, the space L∞(S, μ) is defined as follows. We start with the set of all measurable functions from S to C (or R) which are essentially bounded, i.e. bounded up to a set of measure zero. Again two such functions are identified if they are equal almost everywhere. Denote this set by L∞(S, μ). For f in L∞(S, μ), its essential supremum serves as an appropriate norm:
As before, we have
if f ∈ L∞(S,μ) ∩ Lq(S,μ) for some q < ∞.
For 1 ≤ p ≤ ∞, Lp(S, μ) is a Banach space. Completeness can be checked using the convergence theorems for Lebesgue integrals.
When the underlying measure space S is understood, Lp(S,μ) is often abbreviated Lp(μ), or just Lp. The above definitions generalize to Bochner spaces.
[edit] Special cases
When p = 2; like the
space, the space L2 is the only Hilbert space of this class. The additional inner product structure allows for a richer theory, with applications to, for instance, Fourier series and quantum mechanics.
If we use complex-valued functions, the space L∞ is a commutative C*-algebra with pointwise multiplication and conjugation. For many measure spaces, including all sigma-finite ones, it is in fact a commutative von Neumann algebra. An element of L∞ defines a bounded operator on any Lp space by multiplication.
The
spaces (1 ≤ p ≤ ∞) are a special case of L p spaces, when the set S is the positive integers, and the measure used in the integration in the definition is a counting measure. More generally, if one considers any set S with the counting measure, the resulting L p space is denoted
. For example, the space
is the space of all sequences indexed by the integers, and when defining the p-norm on such a space, one sums over all the integers. The space
, where n is the set with n elements, is Rn with its p-norm as defined above.
[edit] Properties of Lp spaces
[edit] Dual spaces
The dual space (the space of all continuous linear functionals) of Lp(μ) for
has a natural isomorphism with Lq(μ), where q is such that 1/p + 1/q = 1, which associates
with the functional
defined by
The mapping
is a linear mapping from Lq(μ) into Lp(μ) * , which is an isometry onto its image by Hölder's inequality. It is also possible to show that any G
can be expressed this way: i.e., that κ is a continuous linear bijection of Banach spaces. By the open mapping theorem, it follows that κ is an isomorphism of Banach spaces.
Since the relationship 1/p + 1/q = 1 is symmetric, Lp(μ) is reflexive for these values of p: the natural monomorphism from Lp(μ) to Lp(μ) * * obtained by composing κ with the adjoint of its inverse
is onto, that is, it is an isomorphism of Banach spaces.
If the measure μ on S is sigma-finite, then the dual of L1(μ) is isomorphic to L∞(μ). However, except in rather trivial cases, the dual of L∞ is much bigger than L1. Elements of (L∞)* can be identified with bounded signed finitely additive measures on S in a construction similar to the ba space.
If 0 < p < 1, then Lp can be defined as above, but || · ||p does not satisfy the triangle inequality in this case, and hence it defines only a quasi-norm. However, we can still define a metric by setting d(f, g) = (||f − g||p)p. The resulting metric space is complete, and L p for 0 < p < 1 is the prototypical example of an F-space that is not locally convex.
[edit] Embeddings
Colloquially, if 1 ≤ p < q ≤ ∞, Lp(S) contains functions that are more locally singular while elements of Lq(S) can be more spread out. Consider the Lebesgue measure on the half line (0, ∞). A continuous function in L1 might blow up near 0 but must decay sufficiently fast toward infinity. On the other hand, continuous functions in L∞ need not decay at all but no blow-up is allowed. The precise technical result is following:
- Lp(S) is not contained in Lq(S) iff S contains sets of arbitrarily small measure, and
- Lq(S) is not contained in Lp(S) iff S contains sets of arbitrarily large measure. In particular, if the domain S has finite measure, the bound (a consequence of Hölder's inequality)
- means the space Lq is continuously embedded in Lp.
[edit] Applications
Lp spaces are widely used in mathematics and applications.
Fourier series transform between Lp and
.
The Hilbert space L2 is central to quantum mechanics.
In statistics, measures of central tendency and statistical dispersion, such as the mean, median, and standard deviation, are defined in terms of Lp metrics, and measures of central tendency can be characterized as solutions to variational problems.
[edit] Weighted Lp spaces
As before, consider a measure space
. Let
be a measurable function. The w-weighted Lp space is defined as
, where
means the measure ν defined by
or, in terms of the Radon-Nikodym derivative,
The norm for
is explicitly
[edit] See also
[edit] References
- Adams, Robert A. (1975), Sobolev Spaces, New York: Academic Press, ISBN 0-12-044150-0
- Dunford, Nelson & Schwartz, Jacob T. (1958), Linear operators, volume I, Wiley-Interscience.
- Hewitt, Edwin & Stromberg, Karl (1965), Real and abstract analysis, Springer-Verlag.























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