Uniformly smooth renorming of Banach spaces with modulus of convexity of power type 2 (Q2499241)

Improving upon a result of \textit{S. A.~Rakov} [J. Sov. Math. 31, 2713--2721 (1985; Zbl 0572.46011)], the authors show that if the modulus of convexity \(\delta_X\) of a Banach space \(X\) for some \(b \geq 0\) satisfies \(\lim \inf_{\varepsilon \rightarrow 0} \delta_X(\varepsilon)/\varepsilon^2 \geq 1/\delta(1+b)\), then \(X\) is \(q\)-uniformly smoothly renormable for \(q=1+1/(1+k_1 b)\), where \(k_1\) is a universal constant. The concrete example of \(\ell_p\)-spaces shows that this estimate is sharp up to the multiplicative constant \(k_1\), when \(b \rightarrow 0\) as well as when \(b \rightarrow \infty\). The proof uses well-known results on basic sequences in Banach spaces and Walsh--Paley martingales as well as a lower bound for the modulus of convexity of the associated Köthe--Bochner space \(L_2(X)\). The latter in turn depends on a non trivial statement of two-dimensional nature which itself makes crucial use of Euclidean geometry in the plane and nice differentiability properties of the norm when the modulus of smoothness has an estimate of power type~\(2\).