Functional analysis
Hilbert spaces can be completely classified: there is a unique Hilbert space up to isomorphism for every cardinality of the orthonormal basis. Finite-dimensional Hilbert spaces are fully understood in linear algebra, and infinite-dimensional separable Hilbert spaces are isomorphic to formula_1. Separability being important for applications, functional analysis of Hilbert spaces consequently mostly deals with this space. One of the open problems in functional analysis is to prove that every bounded linear operator on a Hilbert space has a proper invariant subspace. Many special cases of this invariant subspace problem have already been proven.
Beckman–Quarles theorem
Beckman and Quarles also provide a counterexample for Hilbert space, the space of square-summable sequences of real numbers. This example involves the composition of two discontinuous functions: one that maps every point of the Hilbert space onto a nearby point in a countable dense subspace, and a second that maps this dense set into a countable unit simplex (an infinite set of points all at unit distance from each other). These two transformations map any two points at unit distance from each other to two different points in the dense subspace, and from there map them to two different points of the simplex, which are necessarily at unit distance apart. Therefore, their composition preserves unit distances. However, it is not an isometry, because it maps every pair of points, no matter their original distance, either to the same point or to a unit distance.