Inequalities for distances between points and distance preserving mappings (Q2483936)

The authors consider a real (or complex) inner product space \(H\); they consider also the norm generated by the inner product. The parallelogram law states that the equality \[ \| y-x \|^2 +\| z-y \|^2 + \| w-z \|^2 + \| x-w \|^2 = \| z-x \|^2 + \| w-y \|^2 \] holds true if and only if \(y-x\), \(z-y\), \(w-z\), \(x-w\) are the sides of a (possibly degenerate) parallelogram with diagonals \(z-x\) and \(w-y\). In this paper the author presents a generalization of the short diagonals lemma by proving a new inequality for distances between six points. In 1970 Aleksandrov had raised a question of whether a map \(f:X\longrightarrow Y\) between normed spaces preserving a distance \(\rho >0\) is an isometry. Beckman and Quarles knew in 1953 the answer to this question in the case of the \(n\)-dimensional Euclidean space when \(2\leq n<\infty\) and provided examples for non-isometric mappings which preserve unit distance for one-dimensional or for infinite dimensional real Euclidean spaces. In 1990 Rassias posed the following question: What happens if two (or more) distances are preserved by a map between normed spaces? Such a problem is called the Aleksandrov-Rassias problem. In this paper the author also uses the generalization he obtained of the short diagonals lemma to investigate the Aleksandrov-Rassias problem in the particular cases where some distances are contractive and other distances are extensive.