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.
Triangular matrix
The fact that commuting matrices have a common eigenvector can be interpreted as a result of Hilbert's Nullstellensatz: commuting matrices form a commutative algebra formula_21 over formula_22 which can be interpreted as a variety in "k"-dimensional affine space, and the existence of a (common) eigenvalue (and hence a common eigenvector) corresponds to this variety having a point (being non-empty), which is the content of the (weak) Nullstellensatz. In algebraic terms, these operators correspond to an algebra representation of the polynomial algebra in "k" variables.