No CrossRef data available.
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 09 April 2009
For any collection of closed subspaces of a complex Hilbert space the set of bounded operators that leave invariant all the members of the collection is a weakly-closed algebra. The class of such algebras is precisely the class of reflexive algebras as defined for example in Radjavi and Rosenthal (1969) and contains the class of von Neumann algebras.In this paper we consider the problem of when such algebras are finitely generated as weakly-closed algebras. It is to be hoped that analysis of this problem may shed some light on the famous unsolved problem of whether every von Neumann algebra on a separable Hilbert space is finitely generated. The case where the underlying space is separable and the collection of subspaces is totally ordered is dealt with in Longstaff (1974). In the present paper the result of Longstaff (1974) is generalized to the case of a direct product of countably many totally ordered collections each on a separable space. Also a method of obtaining non-finitely generated reflexive algebras is given.