Mikusiński

In the end of the last century, Oliver Heaviside inaugurated an operational calculus in connection with his researches in electromagnetic theory. In his operational calculus, the operator of differentiation was denoted by the symbol "p". The explanation of this operator p as given by him was difficult to understand and to use, and the range of the valid­ ity of his calculus remains unclear still now, although it was widely noticed that his calculus gives correct results in general. In the 1930s, Gustav Doetsch and many other mathematicians began to strive for the mathematical foundation of Heaviside's operational calculus by virtue of the Laplace transform -pt e f(t)dt.

In this set of lecture notes, we present a culmination of results on infinite matrices which were evolved by the members of the Katowice Br-anch of the Mathematics Institute of the Polish Academy of Sciences. In the early history of functional analysis Hsliding humpH methods were used extensively to establish some of the early abstract results in functional analysis. For example, the first proofs of versions of the Uniform Boundedness Principle by Hahn and Banach and Hildebrand utilized sliding hump methods ([18], [39], [42], [35]).

Multivariable analysis is an important subject for mathematicians, both pure and applied. Apart from mathematicians, we expect that physicists, mechanical engi­ neers, electrical engineers, systems engineers, mathematical biologists, mathemati­ cal economists, and statisticians engaged in multivariate analysis will find this book extremely useful. The material presented in this work is fundamental for studies in differential geometry and for analysis in N dimensions and on manifolds. It is also of interest to anyone working in the areas of general relativity, dynamical systems, fluid mechanics, electromagnetic phenomena, plasma dynamics, control theory, and optimization, to name only several. An earlier work entitled An Introduction to Analysis: from Number to Integral by Jan and Piotr Mikusinski was devoted to analyzing functions of a single variable. As indicated by the title, this present book concentrates on multivariable analysis and is completely self-contained. Our motivation and approach to this useful subject are discussed below. A careful study of analysis is difficult enough for the average student; that of multi variable analysis is an even greater challenge. Somehow the intuitions that served so well in dimension I grow weak, even useless, as one moves into the alien territory of dimension N. Worse yet, the very useful machinery of differential forms on manifolds presents particular difficulties; as one reviewer noted, it seems as though the more precisely one presents this machinery, the harder it is to understand.