A note on the symmetry of sequence spaces (Q2049280)

This paper gives a self-contained presentation of results and properties of symmetric Banach sequence spaces and the existence of continuous symmetric linear functionals on those spaces. A Banach sequence space \(X\) over the real or complex numbers (\(\mathbb{K}\)) is a subspace of the space of all sequences \(\mathbb{K}^{\mathbb{N}}\), endowed with a complete norm and satisfying the following property: If \(y=\{y_n\} \in X\) and \(x=\{x_n\}\) is such that \(|x_n|\leq |y_n|\), for all \(n \in \mathbb{N},\) then \(x \in X\) and \(\|x\|\leq \|y\|\). A Banach sequence space is symmetric if for every \(x \in X\) and for every permutation \(\sigma\) of \(\mathbb{N}\), \(x_{\sigma}=\{x_{\sigma(n)}\} \in X\) and \(\|x_{\sigma}\|=\|x\|\). Given a bounded sequence in \(\mathbb{K}^{\mathbb{N}}\), \(x=\{x_n\}\), its decreasing rearrangement is defined to be the sequence \(x^*=\{x_n^*\}\) with \[ x_n^* = \inf \Bigl\{ \sup_{k \in \mathbb{N}\setminus J} |x_k|: J \subset \mathbb{N}, \ \operatorname{card} J <n \Bigr\}. \] The main result in the paper reads as follows: {Theorem 1.} Let \(X\) be a Banach sequence space. The following statements are equivalent: \begin{itemize} \item[(1)] \(X\) is symmetric. \item[(2)] \(x \in X\) if and only if \(x^* \in X\) and \(\|x\|=\|x^*\|\). \end{itemize} This paper is divided into three sections. It also contains an appendix on Banach limits. The first section gives an introduction to the problems addressed and a clear articulation with known results from the theory of symmetric sequence spaces. The introduction ends with a question on the existence of continuous symmetric linear functionals. Section~2 is devoted to the proof of Theorem~1. In Section~3, the authors address the question of the existence of sequence spaces, other than \(\ell_1\), that support nonzero symmetric linear functionals. Towards this, they give necessary and sufficient conditions for the existence of such functionals for real symmetric Banach sequence spaces. Further, they conclude that separable symmetric Banach spaces do not support nontrivial symmetric linear functionals. A few illustrative examples are included.