Ramsey-Milman phenomenon, Urysohn metric spaces, and extremely amenable groups (Q1611548)

There are various equivalent definitions of amenability of a locally compact group. It seems that, for general topological groups \(G\), the following notion is most appropriate and has become standard. \(G\) is said to be amenable if every continuous affine action of \(G\) on a compact convex set has a fixed point. This condition is equivalent to the existence of a left invariant mean on the space of bounded right uniformly continuous functions on \(G\). Surprisingly, many non-locally compact topological groups share the much stronger property that every continuous action on any compact space admits a fixed point (equivalently, the invariant mean can be chosen to be multiplicative). Such topological groups are called extremely amenable. The first natural examples of extremely amenable groups were discovered by \textit{M. Gromov} and \textit{M. Milman} [Am. J. Math. 105, 843-854 (1983; Zbl 0522.53039)]: The unitary and orthogonal groups of an infinite-dimensional Hilbert space, endowed with the strong operator topology. More recently, the author of the present article showed that the group of orientation preserving homeomorphisms of the real line with the compact-open topology is extremely amenable [Trans. Am. Math. Soc. 350, 4149-4165 (1998; Zbl 0911.54034)]. The main result of the remarkable paper under review is that the group of isometries, with the compact-open topology, of Urysohn's universal complete separable metric space (in fact, of any generalized Urysohn metric space which is homogeneous in a certain sense) is extremely amenable (Theorems 4.11 and 6.6). The proof exploits the technique of concentration of measure and Ramsey-type results for metric spaces. An unpublished, very recent result of Uspenskij states that every topological group embeds into some such isometry group. Consequently, one obtains that every topological group can be embedded into an extremely amenable group.