Riesz-Schur transforms

We investigate nontrigonometric forms of Riesz transforms in the context of Schur multipliers. This refines Grothendieck-Haagerup's endpoint criterion with a new condition for the Schatten p-boundedness of Schur multipliers and strengthens Potapov/Sukochev's solution of Arazy's conjecture. We recover as well dimension-free estimates for trigonometric Riesz transforms. Our discrete approach is much simpler than previous harmonic analysis and probabilistic approaches. As an application, we find a very simple proof of recent criteria for Schur multipliers of H\"ormander-Mikhlin and Marcinkiewicz type.