Probabilistic forecasting: why model imperfection is a poison pill

This volume is a serious attempt to open up the subject of European philosophy of science to real thought, and provide the structural basis for the interdisciplinary development of its specialist fields, but also to provoke reflection on the idea of ‘European philosophy of science’. This efforts should foster a contemporaneous reflection on what might be meant by philosophy of science in Europe and European philosophy of science, and how in fact awareness of it could assist philosophers interpret and motivate their research through a stronger collective identity. The overarching aim is to set the background for a collaborative project organising, systematising, and ultimately forging an identity for, European philosophy of science by creating research structures and developing research networks across Europe to promote its development.

Limit operators, collective compactness, and the spectral theory of infinite matrices

In the first half of this memoir we explore the interrelationships between the abstract theory of limit operators (see e.g. the recent monographs of Rabinovich, Roch and Silbermann (2004) and Lindner (2006)) and the concepts and results of the generalised collectively compact operator theory introduced by Chandler-Wilde and Zhang (2002). We build up to results obtained by applying this generalised collectively compact operator theory to the set of limit operators of an operator (its operator spectrum). In the second half of this memoir we study bounded linear operators on the generalised sequence space , where and is some complex Banach space. We make what seems to be a more complete study than hitherto of the connections between Fredholmness, invertibility, invertibility at infinity, and invertibility or injectivity of the set of limit operators, with some emphasis on the case when the operator is a locally compact perturbation of the identity. Especially, we obtain stronger results than previously known for the subtle limiting cases of and . Our tools in this study are the results from the first half of the memoir and an exploitation of the partial duality between and and its implications for bounded linear operators which are also continuous with respect to the weaker topology (the strict topology) introduced in the first half of the memoir. Results in this second half of the memoir include a new proof that injectivity of all limit operators (the classic Favard condition) implies invertibility for a general class of almost periodic operators, and characterisations of invertibility at infinity and Fredholmness for operators in the so-called Wiener algebra. In two final chapters our results are illustrated by and applied to concrete examples. Firstly, we study the spectra and essential spectra of discrete Schrödinger operators (both self-adjoint and non-self-adjoint), including operators with almost periodic and random potentials. In the final chapter we apply our results to integral operators on .