Technically, a Hilbert space is a complete inner product space, and the collection of square-integrable functions is only one example of a Hilbert space. In quantum mechanics, then,
Outline
In the last two chapters, we have stumbled on a number of interesting properties of simple quantum systems. Some of these are ―accidental‖ features of specific potentials (the even spacing of energy levels for the harmonic oscillator, for example), but others seem to be more general, and it would be nice to prove them once and for all (the uncertainty principle, for instance, and the orthogonality of stationary states).
A set of functions, { fn }, is orthonormal if they are normalized and mutually orthogonal:
Finally, a set of functions is complete if any other function g(x) (in Hilbert space) can be expressed as a linear combination of them: