We will use the completeness of
proved last week. Let
be a Cauchy sequence in
Consider first the set
where at least one of the
's is non-zero. This is a countable union of
measurable sets, hence measurable. It is in fact a countable union of sets of
finite measure, for instance
Now that we have our putative limit we can use Fatou's Lemma. Applied to
the sequence of measurable, non-negative, functions
with
fixed and
it states that
See if you can show that the limit
is
independent of the order chosen for
Thus we can proceed by induction to define an orthonormal set, which will
either be finite or countable (depending on In either case it is
complete. To see this, suppose there is some element
orthogonal
to all the
By the density of
for any
there
exists
such that
However,
is in the
(finite) span of the
so
This however
implies, by Pythagorus' theorem, that
Thus
so in fact
and hence
proving the completeness.
So I need to go back and check some version of their equality. The following will do for present purposes.
This argument only needs slight modification to show that every Riemann
integrable function on is Lebesgue integrable and that the
integrals are equal; it is done in Adams and Guillemin.
Thus we know that the Fourier functions
do indeed form a
countable orthonormal set for
We still need to know that
it is complete. This involves some more work.
However this will take some work.
Before worrying about the proof of this, let us apply it to and
for some
On the left in
(26) the inner integral is our definition of
in
(25) except for the missing constant. On the right in
(26) we compute, using equality of Riemann and Lebesgue
integrals for continuous functions, finding
![]() ![]() ![]() |
(26) |
We have to prove (26). Again this is a return to
basics. Notice first that both sides of (26) do make sense
if
since then the integrated functions
Now, (26) is separately linear in and
So as
usual we can assume these functions are positive, by first replacing the
functions by their real and imaginary parts, and then their positive and negative
parts. On the left the we can take a sequence of non-negative simple functions
approaching
from below and we get convergence in
Similarly on the right the integrated functions approach
uniformly so the integrals converge. The same argument works for
so
it suffices to prove (26) for simple functions and hence,
again using linearity, for the characteristic functions of two measurable
sets,
measurable. Recalling what it
means to be measurable, we can approximate say
in measure, by a
sequence of elementary sets, each a finite union of disjoint
intervals. Using Lemma 1 (several times) the resulting
integrals converge. Applying the same arguement to
it suffices to
prove (26) when
and
are the characteristic
functions of intervals. In this case our identity has become rather
trivial, except that we have to worry about the various cases. So, suppose
that
is the characteristic function of
a subinterval of
(open, half-open or closed does not matter of course). We are
trying to prove
The reason for looking at is that, from (36),
I should have commented a little on the case
Richard B. Melrose 2004-05-24