Singular points for tilings of normed spaces (Q5928714)

A body in a normed space is a nonempty closed set with dense interior. A tiling of a normed space is a covering of the space by bodies with pairwise disjoint interiors. Given a tiling \(\tau\) of a normed space \(X\), a point \(x\in X\) is called singular provided each neighborhood of \(x\) meets infinitely many elements of \(\tau\). The authors prove, among other things, the following. Whenever \(\tau\) is a tiling of an infinite-dimensional normed space by convex sets, \(C\) is an element of \(\tau\) and \(x\) is either an extreme point or a PC-point of \(C\), then \(x\) is a singular point. (In fact, if \(x\) is an extreme point of \(C\), then each neigborhood of \(x\) meets at least \(\text{tot}(X)\) elements of \(\tau\), where \(\text{tot}(X)\) is the least cardinal of a weak* dense subset of \(X^*\). In case of PC-point the same holds with \(\text{tot}(X)\) replaced by \(\text{norm}(X)\), the least cardinal of a norming subset of \(X^*\).) A further result is the construction of a locally finite tiling by bounded star-shaped sets in every normed space. This shows that a theorem of \textit{H. H. Corson} on tiling by bounded convex sets (contained in his paper [Fundam. Math. 49, 143-145 (1961; Zbl 0096.31203)] cannot be generalized to tilings by star-shaped sets. Reviewer's remark: The authors conjecture that it is an open problem whether \(\text{tot}(X)=\text{norm}(X)\) for any Banach space \(X\). However the space \(JL\) by \textit{W. B. Johnson} and \textit{J. Lindenstrauss} (sometimes denoted by \(JL_2\)) constructed in their paper [Isr. J. Math. 17, 219-230 (1974; Zbl 0306.46021)] satisfies \(\text{tot}(JL)=\aleph_0\) and \(\text{norm}(JL)>\aleph_0\). This was observed by \textit{E. N. Dancer} and \textit{B. Sims} [Bull. Aust. Math. Soc. 20, 253-257 (1979; Zbl 0405.46009)].