James C. Robinson is a professor in the Mathematics Institute at the University of Warwick. He has been the recipient of a Royal Society University Research Fellowship and an Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC) Leadership Fellowship. He has written six books in addition to his many publications in infinite-dimensional dynamical systems, dimension theory, and partial differential equations.

• Part I. Preliminaries: 1. Vector spaces and bases; 2. Metric spaces; Part II. Normed Linear Spaces: 3. Norms and normed spaces; 4. Complete normed spaces; 5. Finite-dimensional normed spaces; 6. Spaces of continuous functions; 7. Completions and the Lebesgue spaces Lp(Ω); Part III. Hilbert Spaces: 8. Hilbert spaces; 9. Orthonormal sets and orthonormal bases for Hilbert spaces; 10. Closest points and approximation; 11. Linear maps between normed spaces; 12. Dual spaces and the Riesz representation theorem; 13. The Hilbert adjoint of a linear operator; 14. The spectrum of a bounded linear operator; 15. Compact linear operators; 16. The Hilbert–Schmidt theorem; 17. Application: Sturm–Liouville problems; Part IV. Banach Spaces: 18. Dual spaces of Banach spaces; 19. The Hahn–Banach theorem; 20. Some applications of the Hahn–Banach theorem; 21. Convex subsets of Banach spaces; 22. The principle of uniform boundedness; 23. The open mapping, inverse mapping, and closed graph theorems; 24. Spectral theory for compact operators; 25. Unbounded operators on Hilbert spaces; 26. Reflexive spaces; 27. Weak and weak-* convergence; Appendix A. Zorn's lemma; Appendix B. Lebesgue integration; Appendix C. The Banach–Alaoglu theorem; Solutions to exercises; References; Index.

'This excellent introduction to functional analysis brings the reader at a gentle pace from a rudimentary acquaintance with analysis to a command of the subject sufficient, for example, to start a rigorous study of partial differential equations. The choice and order of topics are very well thought-out, and there is a fine balance between general results and concrete examples and applications.' Charles Fefferman, Princeton University, New Jersey