Geometry of three-homogeneous polynomials on real Hilbert spaces (Q1577978)

This article is an interesting contribution to a topic of considerabe recent study: the geometry of spaces of homogeneous polynomials on a Banach space [see e.g. \textit{Y. S. Choi} and \textit{S. G. Kim}, Arch. Math. 71, No. 6, 472-480 (1998; Zbl 0937.46043), \textit{R. A. Ryan} and \textit{B. Turett}, J. Math. Anal. Appl. 221, No. 2, 698-711 (1998; Zbl 0912.46039)], and the reviewer and \textit{M. Klimek}, Arch. Math. 76, 73-80 (2001)]. In the aforementioned article, Choi and Kim characterize the smooth and extreme 2-homogeneous polynomials on 2-dimensional real Hilbert space \(H\) in terms of their coefficients. The author does the same here in the 3-homogeneous case. For example, he shows that if \(P\) is a 3-homogeneous polynomial on \(H\), \(\|P\|= 1\), then \(P\) is an extreme point of the unit ball of \({\mathcal P}(^3H)\) if and only if \(P\) takes the value 1 at more than one unit vector. As the author notes, although the unit spheres of both \({\mathcal P}(^2H)\) and \({\mathcal P}(^3H)\) are the disjoint unions of their respective sets of extreme and smooth points, this result is false in general; indeed, if \(\dim H>2\) or if \(\deg P>3\), there are nonsmooth, nonextreme points of the unit sphere.