Norm-attaining Lipschitz functionals (Q307021)

This paper deals with extensions of the Bishop-Phelps-Bollobás property (BPBp) for Lipschitz functionals. In the introduction, the authors give three definitions towards this extension. The first one concerns a Lipschitz functional on a metric space attaining its norm in the strong sense, the second definition concerns a functional attaining its norm at a given direction and the last one gives the definition of the Bishop-Phelps-Bollobás property for Lipschitz functionals. The main result says that uniformly convex spaces have the LipBPBp. Actually, even a stronger property called local directional Bishop-Phelps-Bollobás property for Lipschitz functionals holds. The subset of all functionals \(f \in \mathrm{Lip}_0(E)\) (with \(E\) a metric space equipped with a distinguished point \(0\) such that \(E\setminus \{0\} \neq \emptyset \)) that attain their norm in the strong sense is denoted by \(SA(E)\). In Section 2, the authors prove that \(SA([0,\,1])\) is not dense in \(\mathrm{Lip}_0([0,\,1])\). Further, for a metrically convex pointed metric space \(E\), \(SA(E)\) is not dense in \(\mathrm{Lip}_0(E)\). The main result in this section reads as follows: {Theorem.} If \(E\) is a locally metric space, then \(SA(E)\) is weakly sequentially dense in \(\mathrm{Lip}_0(E)\). Section 3 is devoted to norm attaining continuous semi-norms on Banach spaces. Given a Banach space \(X\), let \(\mathrm{Sem}(X)\) denote the set of all continuous seminorms on \(X\). The authors prove Bishop-Phelps-Bollobás-like results for seminorms. {Proposition.} Let \(X\) be a Banach space. Then, for every \(\epsilon >0\), there exists \(\delta >0\) such that, for every \(p_0 \in \mathrm{Sem} (X)\) with \(\|p_0\|=1\) and for every \(x_0 \in S_X\) with \(p_0(x_0)>1-\delta\), there exist \(p \in \mathrm{Sem}(X)\) with \(\|p\|=1\) and \(x \in S_X\) such that \[ p(x)=1=\|p\|, \, \|x-x_0\|<\epsilon, \,\, \text{and} \] \[ \,\, \|p-p_0\|_{\infty}=\sup_{x\in S_X}|p(x)-p_0(x)|<\epsilon. \] If \(X\) has the Radon-Nikodým property, then the set of all norm-attaining seminorms is dense in \((\mathrm{Sem}(X), \|\cdot \|_{\mathrm{Lip}})\). In Section 4, the authors prove two ``preliminary'' results, as they call them. The first one is a weak version of the Bishop-Phelps-Bollobás theorem for Lipschitz functionals on a Banach space. The second result formulates sufficient conditions for a Banach space to have the local directional Bishop-Phelps-Bollobás property for Lipschitz functionals. In the last section, the authors prove that every uniformly convex Banach space \(X\) has the local directional Bishop-Phelps-Bollobás property for Lipschitz functionals. There are several unanswered questions that follow from this study, it is written in the paper that the authors were unable to construct a Banach space which does not have the (local) directional Bishop-Phelps-Bollobás property for Lipschitz functionals.