Graduate Student Colloquium

Richard Mack, Pure Mathematics, University of Waterloo

"Dual spaces and von Neumann Algebras"

A canonical construction in Linear Algebra is that of the dual space.
In this talk, we consider two questions:
When is a Banach space a dual space?
When is there only one possible predual?

Examples will be presented illustrating that these are not trivial questions, and a major theorem (Sakai's) will be presented giving a broad class of examples for the second question.