Printable PDF
Department of Mathematics,
University of California San Diego

****************************

Food For Thought Seminar

James Pascoe

UCSD

The Hamburger Moment Problem

Abstract:

This refers to the following problem. Given a sequence of numbers, when are they the moments of some measure (or distribution if you like to normalize to the case that is known as probability.) That is, given a sequence $(a_n)^{\infty}_{n=0}$ when is there a measure such that $a_n = \int x^n d\mu{x}.$ To solve this problem, we introduce some basic modern analysis, specifically Hilbert space techniques, which were invented early in the last century to solve problems like the Hamburger moment problem.

October 4, 2012

11:00 AM

AP&M 7321

****************************