Kadison and Kastler introduced a natural metric on the collection of all$C$*-subalgebras of the bounded operators on a separable Hilbert space. They conjectured that sufficiently close algebras are unitarily conjugate. We establish this conjecture when one algebra is separable and nuclear. We also consider one-sided versions of these notions, and we obtain embeddings from certain near inclusions involving separable nuclear$C$*-algebras. At the end of the paper we demonstrate how our methods lead to improved characterisations of some of the types of algebras that are of current interest in the classification programme.

This paper resolves a number of problems in the perturbation theory of linear operators, linked with the 45-year-old conjecure of M. G. Kreĭn. In particular, we prove that every Lipschitz function is operator-Lipschitz in the Schatten–von Neumann ideals$S$^{$α$}, 1 <$α$< ∞. Alternatively, for every 1 <$α$< ∞, there is a constant$c$_{$α$}> 0 such that $$ {\left\| {f(a) - f(b)} \right\|_{\alpha }} \leqslant {c_{\alpha }}{\left\| f \right\|_{{{\text{Lip}}\,{1}}}}{\left\| {a - b} \right\|_{\alpha }}, $$ where$f$is a Lipschitz function with $$ {\left\| f \right\|_{{{\text{Lip}}\,{1}}}}: = \mathop{{\sup }}\limits_{{_{{\lambda \ne \mu }}^{{\lambda, \mu \in \mathbb{R}}}}} \left| {\frac{{f\left( \lambda \right) - f\left( \mu \right)}}{{\lambda - \mu }}} \right| < \infty, $$ $$ {\left\| \cdot \right\|_{\alpha }} $$ is the norm is$S$^{$α$}, and$a$and$b$are self-adjoint linear operators such that $$ a - b \in {S^{\alpha }} $$ .

Let $ \gamma = \frac{1}{2}\left( {1 + \sqrt {5} } \right) $ denote the golden ratio. H. Davenport and W. M. Schmidt showed in 1969 that, for each non-quadratic irrational real number ξ, there exists a constant$c$> 0 with the property that, for arbitrarily large values of$X$, the inequalities $ \left| {{x_0}} \right| \leqslant X,\,\,\,\left| {{x_0}\xi - {x_1}} \right| \leqslant c{X^{{{{ - 1}} \left/ {\gamma } \right.}}}\,\,\,{\text{and}}\,\,\,\left| {{x_0}{\xi^2} - {x_2}} \right| \leqslant c{X^{{{{ - 1}} \left/ {\gamma } \right.}}} $ admit no non-zero solution $ \left( {{x_0},{x_1},{x_2}} \right) \in {\mathbb{Z}^3} $ . Their result is best possible in the sense that, conversely, there are countably many non-quadratic irrational real numbers ξ such that, for a larger value of c, the same inequalities admit a non-zero integer solution for each$X$≥ 1. Such$extremal$numbers are transcendental and their set is stable under the action of $ {\text{G}}{{\text{L}}_2}\left( \mathbb{Z} \right) $ on $ \mathbb{R}\backslash \mathbb{Q} $ by linear fractional transformations. In this paper, it is shown that there exist extremal numbers ξ for which the Lagrange constant ν(ξ) = liminf_{$q$→∞}$q$||$q$ξ|| is $ \frac{1}{3} $ , the largest possible value for a non-quadratic number, and that there is a natural bijection between the $ {\text{G}}{{\text{L}}_2}\left( \mathbb{Z} \right) $ -equivalence classes of such numbers and the non-trivial solutions of Markoff’s equation.