Benjamin Lotto (chair)

I received my undergraduate education at Yale University, graduating in 1982. I completed my Ph.D. dissertation in 1988 at the University of California, Berkeley under the supervision of Donald Sarason. My main research interests are operator theory, functional analysis, complex analysis, and linear algebra.

More specifically, my main mathematical love is the theory of Banach and Hilbert spaces of holomorphic functions and the operators that act on those spaces. Most of my work involves the classical Hardy spaces and de Branges-Rovnyak spaces (Hilbert spaces of holomorphic functions that live inside the classical Hardy space), and on various special operators that act on those spaces (Toeplitz, Hankel, and composition operators).

Fall '07 information

I am not teaching this semester.

How to reach me

Office: 311 RH
Office hours: By appointment
Phone: (845) 437-7180
Fax: (845) 437-7544
E-mail: lotto@vassar.edu

Recent publications

Toeplitz operators on weighted Hardy spaces. In Krzysztof Jarosz, editor, Function spaces, volume 136 of Lecture notes in pure and applied mathematics, pages 295-300, Marcel Dekker, New York, 1991.
Composition preserves rigidity (with John McCarthy). Bull. Lond. Math. Soc., 25 (1993) 573-576.
Multipliers of de Branges-Rovnyak spaces (with Donald Sarason). Indiana Univ. Math. J., 42 (1993) 907-920.
Von Neumann's inequality for commuting, diagonalizable contractions, I. Proc. Amer. Math. Soc., 120 (1994) 889-895.
Von Neumann's inequality for commuting, diagonalizable contractions, II (with Tim Steger). Proc. Amer. Math. Soc., 120 (1994) 897-901.
Multipliers of de Branges-Rovnyak spaces, II (with Donald Sarason). InInternational Conference on Harmonic Analysis, Trends in Mathematics series, Birkhauser, 1997. Download in DVI or gzipped PS format.
It all adds up to elegance and power: a computer puzzle as a paradigm for doing mathematics. Vassar Quarterly, Winter 1996.
A compact composition operator that is not Hilbert-Schmidt. In Studies in Composition Operators, volume 213 of Contemporary Mathematics, American Mathematical Society, Providence, 1998. Download in DVI (without figures) or gzipped PS (with figures) format.
Boxlike domains in the complex plane (with John Feroe and Charles Steinhorn). Mathematics Magazine, 74/5 (2001) 388–392.

Last modified November 23, 2004, by Benjamin Lotto ( lotto@vassar.edu)

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