Stone's theorem and completeness of orthogonal systems

Abstract

It is well known (e.g. Stone [1]) that the Stone-Weierstrass approximation theorem can be used to prove the completeness of various systems of orthogonal polynomials, e.g. Chebyshev polynomials. In this paper, Stone's theorem is used to prove a more general completeness theorem, which includes as special cases Plancherel's theorem, the corresponding theorem for Hankel transforms, the completeness of various polynomial systems, and certain expansions in Jacobian elliptic functions. The essential feature common to all these systems is a certain algebraic structure — if S is an appropriate vector space spanned by orthogonal functions, then the algebra A generated by S is contained in the closure of S in a suitable norm.