On hereditarily indecomposable Banach spaces (Q5920662)

The main result of this article shows that a non-separable, hereditarily indecomposable Banach space admits an equivalent strictly convex norm, but does not admit an equivalent locally uniformly convex norm. A Banach space is said to be hereditarily indecomposable (HI for short) if it has no infinite-dimensional closed subspace that can be written as the topological direct sum of two infinite-dimensional Banach spaces. The first example of an HI space was constructed by \textit{W.\,T.\thinspace Gowers} and \textit{B.\,Maurey} in [J.~Am.\ Math.\ Soc.\ 6, No.\,4, 851--874 (1993; Zbl 0827.46008)]. The authors of the article under review prove the following result: if \(A\) is a norming set for an infinite-dimensional subspace of an HI space \(X\), then after adding finitely many elements of \(X^*\) it becomes a norming set for the whole space \(X\). One consequence of this is that every HI space embeds into the space \(\ell_\infty\) of bounded sequences. The authors use this to prove their main theorem stated above.