Dirac operators and spectral triples for some fractal sets built on curves

We construct spectral triples and, in particular, Dirac operators, for the algebra of continuous functions on certain compact metric spaces. The triples are countable sums of triples where each summand is based on a curve in the space. Several fractals, like a finitely summable infinite tree and the Sierpinski gasket, fit naturally within our framework. In these cases, we show that our spectral triples do describe the geodesic distance and the Minkowski dimension as well as, more generally, the complex fractal dimensions of the space. Furthermore, in the case of the Sierpinski gasket, the associated Dixmier-type trace coincides with the normalized Hausdorff measure of dimension $\log 3/ \log 2$.Comment: 48 pages, 4 figures. Elementary proofs omitted. To appear in Adv. Mat

Improved Convergence Proof of the Delta Expansion and Order Dependent Mappings

We improve and generalize in several accounts the recent rigorous proof of convergence of delta expansion - order dependent mappings (variational perturbation expansion) for the energy eigenvalues of anharmonic oscillator. For the single-well anharmonic oscillator the uniformity of convergence in $g\in[0,\infty]$ is proven. The convergence proof is extended also to complex values of $g$ lying on a wide domain of the Riemann surface of $E(g)$. Via the scaling relation \`a la Symanzik, this proves the convergence of delta expansion for the double well in the strong coupling regime (where the standard perturbation series is non Borel summable), as well as for the complex ``energy eigenvalues'' in certain metastable potentials. Sufficient conditions for the convergence of delta expansion are summarized in the form of three theorems, which should apply to a wide class of quantum mechanical and higher dimensional field theoretic systems.Comment: some bugs of uuencoded postscript figures are fixe

A walk in the noncommutative garden

This text is written for the volume of the school/conference "Noncommutative Geometry 2005" held at IPM Tehran. It gives a survey of methods and results in noncommutative geometry, based on a discussion of significant examples of noncommutative spaces in geometry, number theory, and physics. The paper also contains an outline (the ``Tehran program'') of ongoing joint work with Consani on the noncommutative geometry of the adeles class space and its relation to number theoretic questions.Comment: 106 pages, LaTeX, 23 figure

Constrained L2L^2-approximation by polynomials on subsets of the circle

We study best approximation to a given function, in the least square sense on a subset of the unit circle, by polynomials of given degree which are pointwise bounded on the complementary subset. We show that the solution to this problem, as the degree goes large, converges to the solution of a bounded extremal problem for analytic functions which is instrumental in system identification. We provide a numerical example on real data from a hyperfrequency filter