Asplunds, yet again (Q6063011)

This article investigates characterizations of Asplund spaces in terms of existence of norm-to-norm (or norm-to-weak) first Baire class selectors of the duality mapping. These selectors turned out to be quite useful for investigating the structure of Asplund spaces. The main theorem of this paper is a nice equivalence between being an Asplund space and various existential statements. In particular, the existence of first Baire class selectors for the argmin set-valued map on the space of continuous functions on the weak-star dual unit ball is shown to be equivalent to Asplundness, and it is interesting to note that Simons' inequality is not needed to prove this equivalence, thanks to an argument due to Charles Stegall.