Published online by Cambridge University Press: 13 November 2015
Let $G$ be a compact group. The aim of this note is to show that the only continuous *-homomorphism from $L^{1}(G)$ to $\ell ^{\infty }\text{-}\bigoplus _{[{\it\pi}]\in {\hat{G}}}{\mathcal{B}}_{2}({\mathcal{H}}_{{\it\pi}})$ that transforms a convolution product into a pointwise product is, essentially, a Fourier transform. A similar result is also deduced for maps from $L^{2}(G)$ to $\ell ^{2}\text{-}\bigoplus _{[{\it\pi}]\in {\hat{G}}}{\mathcal{B}}_{2}({\mathcal{H}}_{{\it\pi}})$.