In a paper from 1976, Berg, Christensen and Ressel prove that the closure of the cone of sums of squares $\sum \mathbb{R}[\underline{X}]^2$ in the polynomial ring $\mathbb{R}[\underline{X}] := \mathbb{R}[X_1,\dots,X_n]$ in the topology induced by the $\ell_1$-norm is equal to $\operatorname{Pos}([-1,1]^n)$, the cone consisting of all polynomials which are non-negative on the hypercube $[-1,1]^n$. The result is deduced as a corollary of a general result, established in the same paper, which is valid for any commutative semigroup. In later work, Berg and Maserick and Berg, Christensen and Ressel establish an even more general result, for a commutative semigroup with involution, for the closure of the cone of sums of squares of symmetric elements in the weighted $\ell_1$-seminorm topology associated to an absolute value. In the present paper we give a new proof of these results which is based on Jacobi's representation theorem from 2001. At the same time, we use Jacobi's representation theorem to extend these results from sums of squares to sums of $2d$-powers, proving, in particular, that for any integer $d\ge 1$, the closure of the cone of sums of $2d$-powers $\sum \mathbb{R}[\underline{X}]^{2d}$ in $\mathbb{R}[\underline{X}]$ in the topology induced by the $\ell_1$-norm is equal to $\operatorname{Pos}([-1,1]^n)$.

In this paper we characterize the positive definite measures with discrete Fourier transform. As an application we provide a characterization of pure point diffraction in locally compact Abelian groups.

In this paper, we give some conditions to judge when a system of Hermitian quadratic forms has a real linear combination which is positive definite or positive semi-definite. We also study some related geometric and topological properties of the moduli space.

Let $H$ be a complex Hilbert space, and $\HH$ be the real linear space of bounded selfadjoint operators on $H$. We study linear maps $\phi\colon \HH \to \HH$ leaving invariant various properties such as invertibility, positive definiteness, numerical range, {\it etc}. The maps $\phi$ are not assumed {\it a priori\/} continuous. It is shown that under an appropriate surjective or injective assumption $\phi$ has the form $X \mapsto \xi TXT^*$ or $X \mapsto \xi TX^tT^*$, for a suitable invertible or unitary $T$ and $\xi\in\{1, -1\}$, where $X^t$ stands for the transpose of $X$ relative to some orthonormal basis. Examples are given to show that the surjective or injective assumption cannot be relaxed. The results are extended to complex linear maps on the algebra of bounded linear operators on $H$. Similar results are proved for the (real) linear space of (selfadjoint) operators of the form $\alpha I+K$, where $\alpha$ is a scalar and $K$ is compact.