A renorming of some nonseparable Banach spaces with the fixed point property (Q2518747)

A Banach space has the \textit{weak fixed point property} if, for every nonempty, weakly compact, convex subset of the Banach space, every nonexpansive self-mapping of the set has a fixed point. The problems of characterizing the Banach spaces that have the weak fixed point property or the Banach spaces that can be renormed to have the weak fixed point property have been investigated for almost forty-five years. In the article under review, the author proves that, if \(X\) is a Banach space such that, for some set \(\Gamma\), there exists a one-to-one continuous linear mapping \(J:X\to c_0(\Gamma)\), then there is an equivalent norm \(|\cdot|\) on \(X\) such that \((X,|\cdot|)\) has the weak fixed point property. As a consequence, this answers a long-standing open question by showing that all reflexive spaces can be renormed to have the (weak) fixed point property. The theorem also shows that many other Banach spaces, such as the weakly compactly generated Banach spaces or duals of separable spaces, can be renormed to have the weak fixed point property. Since there exist Banach spaces with the weak fixed point property that cannot be mapped into \(c_0(\Gamma)\)-spaces by one-to-one continuous linear mappings, the question of which Banach spaces can be renormed to have the weak fixed point property remains open.