James' Theorem Fails for Starlike Bodies

Starlike bodies are interesting in nonlinear functional analysis because they are strongly related to bump function sand to n-homogeneous polynomials on Banach spaces, and their geometrical proper ties are thus worth studying. In this paper we deal wit the question whether James' theorem on the char...

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Bibliographic Details
Authors: Azagra Rueda, Daniel; Deville, Robert
Format: Article
Publication date:2001
Country:España
Institution:Universidad Complutense de Madrid (UCM)
Repository:Docta Complutense
Language:English
OAI Identifier:oai:docta.ucm.es:20.500.14352/57130
Online Access:https://hdl.handle.net/20.500.14352/57130
Access Level:Open access
Keyword:517.98
Starlike body
Convex body
James' theorem
Characterization of reflexivity
Análisis funcional y teoría de operadores
Description
Summary:Starlike bodies are interesting in nonlinear functional analysis because they are strongly related to bump function sand to n-homogeneous polynomials on Banach spaces, and their geometrical proper ties are thus worth studying. In this paper we deal wit the question whether James' theorem on the characterization of reflexivity holds for (smooth) starlike bodies, and we establish that a feeble form of this result is trivially true for starlike bodies in nonreflexive Banach spaces, but a reasonable strong version of James' theorem for starlike bodies is never true, even in the smooth case. We also study the related question as to how large the set of gradients of a bump function can be, and among other results we obtain the following new characterization of smoothness in Banach spaces: a Banach space X has a C-1 Lipschitz bump function if and only if there exists another C-1 smooth Lipschitz bump function whose set of gradients contains the unit ball of the dual space X*. This result might also be relevant to the problem of finding an Asplund space with no smooth bump functions.