PRODUCTS OF DIFFERENTIAL EXPRESSIONS WITHOUT SMOOTHNESS ASSUMPTIONS

Abstract

To form products of differential expressions in the classical way it is necessary to place heavy differentiability assumptions on the coefficients. Here we consider symmetric (formally self-adjoint) expressions defined, not in the classical way, but in terms of quasi-derivatives. With this very general notion of symmetry we show that products such as M1M2MI of symmetric expressions M1, Hp can be formed vithout any smoothness assumptions on the coefficients and such products are symmetric expressions.