Geometric properties of Banach spaces and the existence of nearest and farthest points (Q2495005)

The paper is a survey on various generic existence and uniqueness results for nearest points and farthest points for a subset \(Z\) of a Banach space \(X\). Generic means that, except for a set of first Baire category, every element of \(X\) has a (unique) nearest (resp., farthest) point in \(Z\). The paper emphasizes that these kind of results are tightly connected with the geometric properties of the space \(X\), like various rotundity and smoothness conditions, Kadets--Klee property, Efimov--Stechkin property, etc. Some proofs along with some open problems are also included.