A Primer, and Beyond, on Composition Operators on the Unit Disk

This is a contemporary treatment of composition operators on Banach spaces of analytic functions in one complex variable. It provides a step-by-step introduction, starting with a review (including full proofs) of the key tools needed, and building the theory with a focus on Hardy and Bergman spaces. Several proofs of operator boundedness (Littlewood's principle) are given, and the authors discuss approaches to compactness issues and essential norm estimates (Shapiro's theorem) using different tools such as Carleson measures and Nevanlinna counting functions. Membership of composition operators in various ideal classes (Schatten classes for instance) and their singular numbers are studied. This framework is extended to Hardy-Orlicz and Bergman-Orlicz spaces and finally, weighted Hardy spaces are introduced, with a full characterization of those weights for which all composition operators are bounded. This will be a valuable resource for researchers and graduate students working in functional analysis, operator theory, or complex analysis.

Pascal Lefèvre is a Professor at the University of Artois (France). After a Ph.D. thesis on harmonic analysis, Banach spaces and interplay with basic number theory he has worked for twenty years on composition operators.

Hervé Queffélec is an Emeritus Professor at the University of Lille (France). He completed his Ph.D. thesis on harmonic analysis, Banach spaces and Dirichlet series and has worked on composition operators for the last twenty-five years.