Functional Analysis – Is Every Hilbert Space Separable?

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A Hilbert space is a complete inner product space; that is any Cauchy sequence is convergent using the metric induced by the inner product.

From Wikipedia: A Hilbert space is separable if and only if it has a countable orthonormal basis.

What are the examples of non-separable Hilbert spaces?
From an applied point of view, are all interesting (finite or infinite) Hilbert spaces separable?

Best Answer

The space $l^2(\mathbb R)$ is another example of a non-separable Hilbert space: It consists of all functions $f:\mathbb R\to\mathbb R$ such that $f(x)\ne0$ only for countable many $x$, and $$ \sum_{x\in \mathbb R}f(x)^2 <\infty. $$ It is easy to see that this is a Hilbert space, the crucial argument is that the countable union of countable sets is countable.

The functions $f_y$ defined by $$ f_y(x) = \begin{cases} 1 &\text{ if } x=y\\ 0 & \text{ else}\end{cases} $$ are an uncountable set of elements with distance $\sqrt2$, hence $l^2(\mathbb R)$ is not separable.