Smooth partitions of unity on Banach spaces (Q529379)

A separable Banach space admits a smooth bump function if and only if it admits smooth partitions of unity. For nonseparable Banach spaces, the following is an open problem. {\parindent=7mm \begin{itemize} \item[(\(\ast\))] Does the existence of a smooth bump function imply the existence of smooth partitions of unity? \end{itemize}} In the past, this problem has been attacked by quite a few strong researchers and a positive answer was established in many cases. The author finds in Theorem 2 a new equivalent condition for a general normed linear space to admit locally finite and \(\sigma\)-discrete \(C^k\)-smooth partitions of unity. Moreover, using this condition, he quite easily recovers most of the known results concerning positive answers to \((\ast)\) obtained in the past as mentioned above. The paper is very clearly written and is highly recommended to anyone interested in the problem \((\ast)\).