Dr. Volker Runde, Professor

Office 675 Central Academic Building Office hours MWF 10-11 or by appointment Mailing Address Department of Mathematical and Statistical Sciences University of Alberta Edmonton, Alberta Canada T6G 2G1 Phone (780) 492-3526 Fax (780) 492-6826 Email vrunde@ualberta.ca

Education

Diplom (M.Sc.), Westfälische Wilhelms Universität Münster (Germany), 1990.
Ph.D., University of California at Berkeley, 1993.
Habilitation, Universität des Saarlandes (Germany), 1999.

Research

My research area is functional analysis, especially Banach algebras, and its interplay with abstract harmonic analysis. A central role in my research is played by the phenomenon of amenability and its various manifestations. The notion of amenability has its origins with measure theoretic problems and paradoxical decompositions, such as the Banach-Tarski paradox: an orange can be cut into finitely many pieces, which can be reassembled to yield two oranges (if you believe in the axiom of choice as most people do). The reason for this paradox is the fact that the free group in two generators is not amenable. The amenability of a group G can be expressed in terms of its convolution algebra L¹(G). This characterization initiated the theory of amenable Banach algebras, which has been a very active field of research since its inception. In recent years, I have used operator space methods to study the Fourier algebra A(G) and related algebras.

My Erdös number is 4.

Teaching

Fall 2012:	MATH 417 (Honors Real Variables, I)
Winter 2013:	MATH 201 (Differential Equations)
Past courses:	MATH 102 (Applied Linear Algebra)
	MATH 209 (Calculus, III)
	MATH 217 (Honors Advanced Calculus, I)
	MATH 317 (Honors Advanced Calculus, II)
	MATH 411 (Honors Complex Variables)
	MATH 418 (Honors Real Variables, II)
	MATH 447 (Elementary Topology)
	MATH 496 (Honors Seminar: Harmonic Analysis)
	MATH 516 (Linear Analysis)
	MATH 518 (Functional Analysis)
	MATH 519 (Operator Algebras)
	MATH 543 (Measure Theory)
	MATH 617 (Topics in Functional Analysis: Introduction to Operator Spaces)
	MATH 617 (Topics in Functional Analysis: Non-Abelian Group Duality and Quantization)

Publications

Honors Math and Stats Programs

Banach Algebras 2009 - Pictures from the 19^th International Conference on Banach Algebras

CAHAS 2009 (Laufest)

Badefest - conference to celebrate William G. Bade's 80th birthday (Berkeley, June 17-18, 2004)