A counterexample to a strengthening of a question of V. D. Milman

DOI10.5802/AHL.168MaRDI QIDQ6093070zbMATH OpenOpenAlexWikidataFDO

Authors W. Timothy Gowers, K. Wyczesany

Publication date 6 September 2023

Published in Annales Henri Lebesgue (Search for Journal in Brave)

Copyright license Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International

Full work available at URL https://arxiv.org/abs/2110.03023

zbMATH Keywords

almost Euclidean subspacenormed spacewell complemented subspace

Mathematics Subject Classification ID

Asymptotic theory of Banach spaces (46B06) Probabilistic methods in Banach space theory (46B09) Asymptotic theory of convex bodies (52A23)

Abstract: Let $|cdot|$ be the standard Euclidean norm on $mathbb{R}^n$ and let $X=(mathbb{R}^n,|cdot|)$ be a normed space. A subspace $YsubsetX$ is emph{strongly $alpha$-Euclidean} if there is a constant $t$ such that $t|y|leq|y|leqalphat|y|$ for every $yinY$, and say that it is emph{strongly $alpha$-complemented} if $|P_Y|leqalpha$, where $P_Y$ is the orthogonal projection from $X$ to $Y$ and $|P_Y|$ denotes the operator norm of $P_Y$ with respect to the norm on $X$. We give an example of a normed space $X$ of arbitrarily high dimension that is strongly 2-Euclidean but contains no 2-dimensional subspace that is both strongly $(1+epsilon)$-Euclidean and strongly $(1+epsilon)$-complemented, where $epsilon>0$ is an absolute constant. This example is closely related to an old question of Vitali Milman.

Review text

Let \(\langle \cdot, \cdot \rangle\) and \(|\cdot|\) be the standard inner product and the corresponding Euclidean norm on \(\mathbb{R}^n \) respectively, \( \|\cdot\|\) be another norm on \(\mathbb{R}^n \), and \(\alpha > 0\). A subspace \(Y\) of the normed space \(X = (\mathbb{R}^n, \|\cdot\|) \) is called \textit{strongly \(\alpha \)-Euclidean} if there is a constant \(t \) such that \(t|y| \leqslant \|y\| \leqslant \alpha t|y| \) for every \(y\in Y \), and it is called \textit{strongly \(\alpha \)-complemented} if \(\|P_Y\| \leqslant \alpha \), where \(P_Y \) is the orthogonal projection from \(X \) to \(Y\) and \(\|P_Y\| \) denotes the operator norm of \(P_Y\) with respect to the norm \( \|\cdot\|\). The authors present an example of \(X = (\mathbb{R}^n, \|\cdot\|) \) of arbitrarily high dimension that is strongly 2-Euclidean but contains no 2-dimensional subspace that is both strongly \((1 + \varepsilon) \)-Euclidean and strongly \((1 + \varepsilon) \)-complemented, where \(\varepsilon > 0\) is an absolute constant. To be more precise, using a probabilistic argument they demonstrate the existence, for every even \(n > 35\), of a self-adjoint idempotent operator (projector on a subspace) \(P: \mathbb{R}^n \to \mathbb{R}^n\) of \(\textrm{rank}\, P = n/2\) such that the norm \[ \|x\| = \langle x, x + Px \rangle^{\frac12} + 2^{-40} n^{-\frac12} \|x\|_1 \] has the desired property with \(\varepsilon = 2^{-1017}\). This property is closely related to the following old open question of Vitali Milman: Is it true that for every \(k \in \mathbb{N}\), \(C \in \mathbb{R}\), and \(\varepsilon > 0\) there exists \(n \in \mathbb{N}\) such that every \(C\)-Euclidean normed space \(X\) of dimension at least \(n\) has a \(k\)-dimensional subspace \(Y \subset X\) that is \((1 + \varepsilon)\)-Euclidean and \((1 + \varepsilon)\)-complemented?

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