Spectral-free methods in the theory of hereditarily indecomposable Banach spaces (Q2233218)

It is well known that every infinite-dimensional Banach space contains an infinite dimensional subspace with a Schauder basis. A natural question is whether every infinite-dimensional Banach space has an infinite-dimensional subspace with an unconditional basis. This problem was solved negatively by \textit{W. T. Gowers} and \textit{B. Maurey} [J. Am. Math. Soc. 6, No.~4, 851--874 (1993; Zbl 0827.46008)]. In fact, Gowers and Maurey constructed a Banach space \(X\) with a stronger property: \(X\) is hereditarily indecomposable (HI for short), i.e., no two subspaces of it are in topological direct sum. They also proved that an HI space is isomorphic to no proper subspace of itself. In the paper under review, the author introduces new methods in the theory of HI spaces, providing new simple proofs of some classical properties of HI spaces. In particular, he obtains a new and direct proof of the fact that an HI space is isomorphic to no proper subspace of itself for real spaces. A quantitative version of this theorem is also presented. In the final section, the author proves new results about the homotopy relation between into isomorphisms from HI spaces. For instance, it is shown that the general linear group of the real HI space built by Gowers and Maurey has exactly \(4\) connected components.