Fourier Analysis: An Introduction (Princeton Lectures in Analysis, Volume 1)

Just started reading it. Has good introductory chapter and overall good flow of the material. Would recommend definitely.

great price and book arrived a lot earlier than expected!

I still have not read anything after chapter two, but the book look nice so far. It has a somewhat different approach by trying to avoid measure theory and still making a few comments on it for those who have already studied.

Thorough and very easy to read

Very useful book in very good conditions

I have just finished a class with the book as its main textbook. The book is well written, but you honestly have to work through each page with pen and paper in hand filling in the omitted steps. Nothing is spoon-fed to you. The exercises are very challenging while the problems develop small theories. If you work through the pain and sweat through the exercises, you will at the end of the book greatly improve your skills and intuition.The author Stein is a leader in his field and has provided plenty of depth and breadth. This also means that he is on a different level and an argument that he calls "simple" has quite often taken me two pages to justify. However, if you put in the effort it will pay off tenfold.

This is a somewhat biased review because sometimes I find myself searching for a good reference that treats a subject matter that is well-known in an easy, direct and accessible way. When I find such a book I end up relieved. This is what happened with the book by Stein and Shakarchi titled "Fourier Analysis".In my case the search was for easy and accessible treatement of the theory of distributions in general and its applications to the wave equation in particular.There are a number of references that treat this subject matter but all the ones I know of do this from a more advanced point of view. Stein and Shakarchi's book stems from an undergraduate lecture sequence thought at Princeton and the level of the text is indeed appropriate for the bright undergraduate who may or may not major in mathematics later on.This is unlike PDE books by Taylor, or lecture notes by Melrose, or even the tiny booklet by Friedlander and Joshi that introduce distributions and their application to PDEs (like the wave equation) and certainly unlike Hörmanders comprehensive 4-volume treatment of the whole subject matter. All these references shoot significantly higher in terms of technical sophistication and I'd certainly not recommend them to typical engineering students for self-study. As possible exception I might mention Shubin's PDE books and encyclopedia contributions but they are more terse than the book under review and give less ground to more introductory matters.Not so the book under review. It's an excellent, well-illustrated and clear presentation of the theory of distributions and its application to the wave equation, covering important (and old) techniques like the method of descend, which is still lacking from many contemporary engineering mathematics textbooks. Yet the book is written in a form and style to be accessible to a typical reader with engineering mathematics background while still being "modern" in it's mathematical language.Hence I have recommended this book to many colleagues (and received enthusiastic reactions) as the only and at that quite excellent introduction ín know of to the theory of distribution, PDEs in that language and Fourier Analysis in that language that I trust to be accessible for non-specialists and as a gentle and non-threatening introduction to more technical texts.

I used this book for an undergraduate-level course in Fourier analysis. It is an excellent text, although I would recommend the prospective learner to take a basic course in real analysis first (or perhaps concurrently, if the learner dares!). With my experience in analysis, it proved very readable. In fact, it strengthened my understanding of (and even interest in!) analysis, as it provides a fruitful application of the subject--one gets to see various important analysis ideas and techniques used in context. One could almost say that the text is an excellent complement to real analysis to help the ideas jell. On the other hand, perhaps it is theoretically possible to use this book as a springboard into learning analysis. The proofs do gloss over some details, which as the previous reviewer noted, can make things tough going at times... I actually found this useful (again, perhaps because of analysis experience), as it omits just enough detail to stay focused on the subject at hand (being too pedantic is likely to make those of shorter attention spans, such as myself, want to wander away), and yet supplies enough detail to remind the reader of the underlying theory, and that all this stuff is mathematically rigorously justified.The course I took was actually a brand-new course created at the undergraduate level, and was structured around the book, which had also just come out at the time. I can say with confidence that the course was a success, which is pretty unusual for something hot off the press (true, the book itself was based on lectures, but every university has its quirks...).

The book holds up quite well overall, but when it coves more intricate concepts, the proofs start to feel a bit hand-wavy. There's a particular chapter that simply states, “this all also works for functions of moderate decrease,” which is not trivial and just wrong.

El libro es muy didactico. Facil de leer. En mi opinion los conocimientos minimos requeridos del lector son: 1).- calculo de dos (o mas) variables, 2).- ecuaciones diferenciles y 3).- variable compleja(basico-intermedio). Vas a disfrutar el libro porque te va a revelar esas cosas que otros libros se reservan en el afan de sintetizar los temas y hacerlos muy practicos. Este libro, en cambio, NO esta (desde mi punto de vista) muy cargado al enfoque puramente teorico. Lo cual lo hace muy interesante y una buena referencia del tema.

Je voulais enfin vraiment comprendre les séries de Fourier. Ce livre m'y a beaucoup aidé. L'approche est différente de la manière française. Les choses ne sont pas seulement démontrées mais expliquées. Excellent complément aux ouvrages français.