Non-Asplund Banach spaces and operators (Q2410356)

A separable Banach space \(X\) is Asplund if and only if it has a separable dual. An operator \(T:X\to Y\) is Asplund if \((T|_Z)^*\) is separable whenever \(Z\) is a separable subspace of \(X\). The motivation for the current paper starts with the paper by \textit{C. Stegall} [Trans. Am. Math. Soc. 206, 213--223 (1975; Zbl 0318.46056)], where a universal operator for the class of non-Asplund operators was found (i.e., a non-Asplund operator which factors through every non-Asplund operator). This result was proved by Stegall using a technical statement, called in the current paper Theorem 1.2, which roughly says that, given a nonseparable subset \(K\subset X^*\) of the dual of a separable Banach space \(X\), it is under certain conditions possible to find a copy of \(\{0,1\}^\omega\) in \((K,w^*)\) which is norm discrete. The main result of this paper, Theorem 3.1 (too involved to be reproduced here), is an analogue to Theorem 1.2 which, under the additional condition that \(K\) is absolutely convex, gives a conclusion which seems to be much stronger than the conclusion of Theorem 1.2. With the help of Theorem 3.1, the author obtains new proofs of old results and a number of very nice new results concerning separable non-Asplund spaces and non-Aplund operators. We select a few of those: (A) if \(X\) is a separable non-Asplund space, then it has a separable non-Aplund quotient with a basis (Theorem 4.5); (B) the author finds a universal operator for the class of operators having separable codomain and adjoint with non-separable range (Corollary 5.6); (C) an operator-theoretic characterization of separable non-Asplund spaces (Theorem 6.1).