REPRESENTATIONS OF REAL BANACH ALGEBRAS

A commutative complex unital Banach algebra can be represented as a space of continuous complex-valued functions on a compact Hausdorff space via the Gelfand transform. However, in general it is not possible to represent a commutative real unital Banach algebra as a space of continuous real-valued functions on some compact Hausdorff space, and for this to happen some additional conditions are needed. In this note we represent a commutative real Banach algebra on a part of its state space and show connections with representations on the maximal ideal space of the algebra (whose existence one has to prove first).