Rethinking polyhedrality for Lindenstrauss spaces (Q503242)

A Banach space is a Lindenstrauss space if its dual is isometric to \(L_1(\mu)\) for some measure \(\mu\); it is polyhedral if the unit balls of its finite-dimensional subspaces are polytopes. In [Proc. Am. Math. Soc. 23, 378--385 (1969; Zbl 0184.15101)], \textit{M. Zippin} claimed that a separable Lindenstrauss space whose unit ball has an extreme point contains an isometric copy of \(c\). This assertion was used by \textit{A. Gleit} and \textit{R. McGuigan} [Proc. Am. Math. Soc. 33, 398--404 (1972; Zbl 0244.46019)] and \textit{A. J. Lazar} [Isr. J. Math. 7, 357--364 (1969; Zbl 0204.45101)] to present characterizations of polyhedral spaces in terms of a geometric condition involving the extreme points of the dual unit ball or in terms of norm-preserving extensions of compact operators. In the article under review, the authors prove that Zippin's claim is incorrect by constructing a separable Lindenstrauss space whose unit ball has an extreme point but the space contains no subspace isometric to \(c\). Their example is also a counterexample to results in the two subsequent articles mentioned above and puts into question other results in these two articles. The authors then provide proofs of some of the statements in these two articles. The authors prove that, for a Lindenstrauss space \(X\), the following properties are equivalent: (i) \(X\) is a polyhedral space; (ii) \(X\) does not contain an isometric copy of \(c\); (iii) \(X\) has a property introduced by \textit{B. Brosowski} and \textit{F. Deutsch} [J. Approx. Theory 10, 245--267 (1974; Zbl 0272.41020)]. The authors also obtain a relationship between Lindenstrauss spaces and norm-preserving extensions of compact operators. In particular, they prove that, if \(X\) is an infinite-dimensional Banach space, the following are equivalent: (i) \(X\) is a Lindenstrauss space such that the sets \(D(x)\) in the range of the duality map are finite-dimensional for each \(x\) in the unit sphere of \(X\); (ii) for every Banach space \(Y\subset Z\), every compact operator \(T:Y\to X\) admits a compact norm-preserving extension \(\widetilde{T}:Z\to X\).