On the smoothness of normed spaces (Q6183260)

This (mostly) survey on smoothness and convexity in normed spaces \(E\) starts out very elementary with the basic connection between smoothness and strict convexity. In Definition 2.8 a simplified formulation of uniform convexity is presented. Section 3 is devoted to the usual modulus of convexity, \(\delta_E\), while in Section 4 a modulus of smoothness, \(\bar{\rho}_E\), slightly different from Day's classical modulus of smoothness, is presented with its properties. The authors call the (non-negative) difference \(d_E(\varepsilon)=\bar{\rho}_E(\varepsilon)-\delta_E(\varepsilon), \varepsilon\in[0,2],\) the modulus of deformation of \(E\) while the deformation of \(E\) is the supremum of \(d_E\) over the intervall \([0,2]\). It turns out that Hilbert spaces has zero deformation while \(d_{C[a,b]}=1\), the biggest possible deformation among normed spaces.