Several remarks on ball-coverings of normed spaces (Q606321)

A ball-covering \(\mathcal B\) of a Banach space is a collection of open balls off the origin whose union contains the unit sphere of the space. A ball-covering of \(X\) is said to be minimal provided that its cardinality \(\mathcal B^\sharp_{\min}\) is the smallest among all cardinalities of ball-coverings of \(X\). If \(\mathcal B = \{B(x_j, r_j)\}\) is a ball-covering of \(X\), then \(r(\mathcal B) = \sup_j r_j\) is called the radius of \(\mathcal B\) and \(\mathcal B\) is said to be \(\alpha\)-off the origin if \(\|x_j\| - r_j \geq \alpha\) for all \(j\). This paper presents two examples related to results of \textit{L.-X.\thinspace Cheng} [Isr.\ J.\ Math.\ 156, 111--123 (2006; Zbl 1139.46016)] and \textit{L.-X.\thinspace Cheng, Q.-J.\thinspace Cheng, H.-H.\thinspace Shi} [Stud.\ Math.\ 192, No.\,1, 15--27 (2009; Zbl 1176.46015)]. The first one shows that for \(X = \ell_1^{(n)}\), \(n \geq 3\), although \(X\) contains an isometric copy of \(\ell_\infty^{(2)}\), we have \(\mathcal B^\sharp_{\min}= n+ 1\). The second one presents a four-dimensional space \(X\) with \(\mathcal B^\sharp_{\min} = 6\) that does not split in an \(\ell_\infty\)-sum of two nontrivial subspaces. The following theorem is proved: \(X\) is uniformly non-square if and only if there exist \(\alpha, \beta > 0\) such that for every two-dimensional subspace \(Y \subset X\) there is a ball-covering \(\mathcal B\) of \(Y\) consisting of three balls such that \(r(\mathcal B) \leq \beta\) and \(\mathcal B\) is \(\alpha\) off the origin.