Georgia Institute of Technology College of Sciences

We discuss a general philosophy that loosely states that if the matrix representation of a linear operator is concentrated on its diagonal, then the operator’s compactness is characterized by the decay of its matrix representation along the diagonal. We formulate rigorous versions of this idea and apply them to study the compactness of (bi-parameter) Calderón-Zygmund operators, pseudodifferential operators, and Fourier integral operators. These applications recover and unify various earlier works and provide new results.