Re: How to motivate a student of functional analysis

Dear Andrej, Two examples that have not been mentioned before: * The use of the Giry monad in stochastic processes. This should motivate CS students as well as (functional) analysists. You can also use co-algebras here. * Gelfand's theorem: commutative C*-algebras are precisely the complex numbers in the topos of sheaves over its spectrum. This will also teach them that the axiom of choice is almost never needed in functional analysis and that there are good reasons to avoid it: E.g. continuous fields of C*-algebras. This is the fundamental work by Banaschewski and Mulvey. Bas