Carleman's inequality is an inequality in mathematics, named after Torsten Carleman, who proved it in 1923 and used it to prove the Denjoy–Carleman theorem on quasi-analytic classes.
Let a1, a2, a3, ... be a sequence of non-negative real numbers, then
The constant e in the inequality is optimal, that is, the inequality does not always hold if e is replaced by a smaller number. The inequality is strict (it holds with "<" instead of "≤") if some element in the sequence is non-zero.
Carleman's inequality has an integral version, which states that
for any f ≥ 0.
A generalisation, due to Lennart Carleson, states the following:
for any convex function g with g(0) = 0, and for any -1 < p < ∞,
Carleman's inequality follows from the case p = 0.
An elementary proof is sketched below. From the inequality of arithmetic and geometric means applied to the numbers