Reflexivity of the isometry group of some classical spaces. (Q1809940)

The paper under review is a continuation of investigations initiated by Kadison and Larson who studied the reflexivity of the Lie algebra of all derivations on a von Neumann algebra, motivated by the study of the Hochschild cohomology of operator algebras. The authors investigate algebraic reflexivity and topological reflexivity of Iso\((X)\), the group of all isometric surjections of a \(\Delta\)-normed vector space \(X\), and of Aut\(({\mathcal{A}})\), the group of all continuous automorphisms of a topological algebra \(\mathcal{A}\). To this end, they concentrate their related investigation on (quasi-)Banach spaces and Banach algebras which play a fundamental role in harmonic analysis such as the spaces \(L_p(\mu)\) and the Hardy space \(H^p\), where \(0 <p < \infty\); \(H(\Omega)\), the Banach algebra of all holomorphic functions on a domain \(\Omega\) in \({\mathbb{C}}\); \({H^{\infty}}(\Omega)\), the Banach algebra of all bounded functions in \(H(\Omega)\); and A\(({\overline{U}})\), the Banach algebra of all continuous functions on the closure of the open unit disc \(U:= \{z \in {\mathbb{C}} \mid | z | < 1 \}\) which are holomorphic on \(U\). In particular, they show that for any infinite-dimensional \(L_p\)-space \(X\), Iso\((X)\) is algebraically reflexive if and only if \(X\) is (isometrically isomorphic to) the sequence space \(l_p\), where \(p \not= 2\) (Theorem 3). Moreover, since every Banach space \(X\) has an equivalent norm so that Iso\((X)\) consists of trivial isometries only, the authors' considerations show the unpleasant fact that the validity of topological reflexivity of Iso\((X)\) strongly depends on the choice of the equivalent norm on the Banach space \(X\) (Theorem 2).