An extension of James's compactness theorem (Q473182)

The main result of this paper is a generalization of James' famous characterization of weakly compact sets. Let \(F\) be a subset of the unit ball of the dual \(Y^*\) of a Banach space \(Y\), let \(X^*\) be another dual space and let \(T\) be a bounded linear operator from \(X^*\) to \(Y\). Let \(\tau_F\) be the topology defined on \(Y\) by the pointwise convergence on \(F\). We assume that \(T\) is a weak*-to-\(\tau_F\) continuous linear operator, and that every element of the range of \(T\) attains its norm at some \(y^*\in F\). Then \(T\) is weak*-to-weak continuous. The delicate proof of this theorem uses in particular Rosenthal's characterization of Banach spaces not containing \(l^1\).