Smooth bump functions and the geometry of Banach spaces. A brief survey (Q1611553)

Due to it is survey nature, the breadth of material included, and the sheer number of results presented, it is impossible to give a detailed summary of this paper. Suffice it to say that it is a largely self-contained (and well-written) exposition of the notion of a smooth ``bump'' function, starting from the classical (motivating) case of such a function on the line and proceeding to the central focus of the paper, the study of the existence of functions of this sort on more general Banach spaces. The principal object of consideration in this context is the geometry of the unit ball in a Banach space, in particular its smoothness and convexity properties. Applications to the question of existence of smooth partitions of unity are also given. The paper should be accessible to anyone having taken a graduate course in functional analysis.