In
mathematics
Mathematics is a field of study that discovers and organizes methods, Mathematical theory, theories and theorems that are developed and Mathematical proof, proved for the needs of empirical sciences and mathematics itself. There are many ar ...
, there are two different notions of semi-inner-product. The first, and more common, is that of an inner product which is not required to be strictly positive. This article will deal with the second, called a L-semi-inner product or semi-inner product in the sense of Lumer, which is an inner product not required to be conjugate symmetric. It was formulated by
Günter Lumer, for the purpose of extending
Hilbert space
In mathematics, a Hilbert space is a real number, real or complex number, complex inner product space that is also a complete metric space with respect to the metric induced by the inner product. It generalizes the notion of Euclidean space. The ...
type arguments to
Banach spaces
In mathematics, more specifically in functional analysis, a Banach space (, ) is a complete normed vector space. Thus, a Banach space is a vector space with a metric that allows the computation of vector length and distance between vectors and ...
in
functional analysis
Functional analysis is a branch of mathematical analysis, the core of which is formed by the study of vector spaces endowed with some kind of limit-related structure (for example, Inner product space#Definition, inner product, Norm (mathematics ...
.
[.] Fundamental properties were later explored by Giles.
Definition
We mention again that the definition presented here is different from that of the "semi-inner product" in standard functional analysis textbooks, where a "semi-inner product" satisfies all the properties of
inner product
In mathematics, an inner product space (or, rarely, a Hausdorff pre-Hilbert space) is a real vector space or a complex vector space with an operation called an inner product. The inner product of two vectors in the space is a scalar, ofte ...
s (including conjugate symmetry) except that it is not required to be strictly positive.
A semi-inner-product, L-semi-inner product, or a semi-inner product in the sense of Lumer for a
linear vector space over the
field of complex numbers is a function from
to
usually denoted by