Recent progress on the restriction conjecture

Terence Tao

Published 2003-11-12Version 1

The purpose of these notes is describe the state of progress on the restriction problem in harmonic analysis, with an emphasis on the developments of the past decade or so on the Euclidean space version of these problems for spheres and other hypersurfaces. As the field is quite large and has so many applications, it will be impossible to completely survey the field, but we will try to at least give the main ideas and developments in this area. The restriction problem are connected to many other conjectures, notably the Kakeya and Bochner-Riesz conjectures, as well as PDE conjectures such as the local smoothing conjecture. For reasons of space, we will not be able to discuss all these connections in detail; our main focus will be on proving restriction theorems for the Fourier transform.