The group of isometries of a Banach space and duality (Q960555)

A subspace \(X\) of \(C(K)\) is said to be C-rich if, for every nonempty open subset \(U \subset K\) and every \(\varepsilon > 0\), there is an \(f \in S_{C(K)}\) with support in \(U\) and \(\mathrm{dist}(f, X) < \varepsilon\). It is shown that for every separable Banach space \(E\) there is a C-rich separable subspace \(X(E)\) of \(C[0,1]\) such that \(X(E)^*\) contains an isometric copy of \(E^*\) as an L-summand. The particular case of \(X = X(\ell_2)\) presents an example of a real Banach space with a ``poor'' group of isometries \(\text{Iso}(X)\) (it has no nontrivial one-parameter uniformly continuous subgroup), but \(\text{Iso}(X^*)\) is ``very big'' (as big as \(\text{Iso}(\ell_2)\)).