On a question of Pietsch (Q830238)

The question of Pietsch alluded to in the title of the paper is the following. Which finite-dimensional subspaces of \(L_p[0,1]\) are isometric to subspaces of~\(\ell_p\)? (Regrettably, Pietsch's name is constantly misspelled in this paper, and even more regrettably, no referee or editor seemed to care.) The question was answered by \textit{F.~Delbaen} et al. [Positivity 2, No. 4, 339--367 (1998; Zbl 0934.46008)] who distinguished whether or not \(p\) is an even integer, and they were even able to treat the case of infinite-dimensional subspaces. Here, the author gives an alternative answer building on the notion of discrete Lévy \(p\)-representation. A finite-dimensional normed space \(F\) has a discrete Lévy \(p\)-representation if there exist a linear isomorphism \(J: F\to \mathbb R^n\) and an even atomic measure \(\xi\) on the unit sphere \(S^{n-1}\) of \(\mathbb R^n\) such that \[ \|x\|^p = \int_{S^{n-1}} |\langle Jx, v\rangle|^p \,d\xi(v) \] for all \(x\). The main result of the paper is Theorem~2 saying that a finite-dimensional normed space is isometric to a subspace of \(\ell_p\) if and only if it has a discrete Lévy \(p\)-representation. As a corollary the author obtains, for \(q\neq2\) and \(n\ge2\), that \(\ell_q^n\) embeds isometrically into \(\ell_p\) if and only if \(p=q\).