Dynamics of the semigroup of contractive automorphisms of Banach spaces (Q6110793)

Theorem 2.3, Proposition 3.1 and Theorem 4.2 in the paper rather clearly summarize the contents of this interesting slightly out-of-the-box paper devoted, as the title says, to explore the dynamics of the semigroup of contractive automorphisms \(\mathrm{Aut}_1(X)\) when acting on the unit sphere \(S\) of a real Banach space \(X\). What the title does not say is that this \(X\) will be, for most of the paper, finite-dimensional. Three notions have to be considered: \textit{semitransitivity} (for each \(x,y\in S\) there is a contractive automorphism \(T\) such that \(Tx=y\)), \textit{bounded semitransitivity} (there is a constant \(K\) such that all \(T\) appearing in the transitivity notion satisfy \(\|T^{-1}\|\leq K\)) and \textit{uniform micro semitransitivity} (for every \(\varepsilon>0\) there is \(\delta>0\) such that, whenever \(x,y\in S\) with \(\|x-y\|<\delta\), there is a contractive automorphism \(T\) such that \(Tx=y\) and \(\|T - \mathrm{Id}\|<\varepsilon\)). These three pieces, ST, BST and UMST in short, articulate the dynamics of \(\mathrm{Aut}_1(X)\) on a finite-dimensional \(X\) as follows. \begin{itemize} \item \(X\) is ST (resp. BST) if and only if \(X^*\) is ST (resp. BST). \item \(X\) is ST (resp. BST) if and only if every point in the unit sphere admits an inner and outer ellipsoid (resp. there is \(\lambda\) such that every point in the unit sphere admits an inner ellipsoid \(E\) and an outer ellipsoid \(F\) such that \(F\subset \lambda E\)). \item If \(\dim X=2\), then \(X\) is UMST if and only if its unit sphere is of class \(C^2\) and has strictly positive curvature at every point. \end{itemize} These results do not exhaust the paper: the reader will find many additional clever examples and a description of UMST norms on the plane.