We introduce and study the notion of hereditarily A-indecomposable Banach space for A a space ideal. For a hereditarily A-indecomposable space X we show that the operators from X into a Banach space Y can be written as the union of two sets A Φ+(X,Y) and A(X;Y ). For some ideals A defined in terms of incomparability, the first set is open, the second set correspond to a closed operator ideal and the union is disjoint.

We consider real Banach spaces X for which the quotient algebra (X)/ℐn(X) is finite-dimensional, where ℐn(X) stands for the ideal of inessential operators on X. We show that these spaces admit a decomposition as a finite direct sum of indecomposable subspaces $X_i$ for which $\left(X_i\right)/ℐn\left(X_i\right)$ is isomorphic as a real algebra to either the real numbers ℝ, the complex numbers ℂ, or the quaternion numbers ℍ. Moreover, the set of subspaces $X_i$ can be divided into subsets in such a way that if $X_i$ and $X_j$ are in different subsets,...

The discrete Wiener-Hopf operator generated by a function $a\left(e^{i\theta }\right)$ with the Fourier series ${\sum }_{n\in \mathbb{Z}}{a}_n{e}^{in\theta }$ is the operator T(a) induced by the Toeplitz matrix ${\left(a_{j-k}\right)}_{j,k=0}^{\infty }$ on some weighted sequence space $l^p({\mathbb{Z}}_{+},w)$. We assume that w satisfies the Muckenhoupt $A_p$ condition and that a is a piecewise continuous function subject to some natural multiplier condition. The last condition is in particular satisfied if a is of bounded variation. Our main result is a Fredholm criterion and an index formula for T(a). It implies that the essential spectrum...