Asymptotic behavior of Fréchet functional equation and some characterizations of inner product spaces (Q6060849)

In the class of mappings \(f: G\to V\) between an abelian group \((G,+)\) and a linear space \(V\) the following functional equation is considered: \[ f(x)-4f(x+y)+6f(x+2y)-4f(x+3y)+f(x+4y)=0,\quad x,y\in G. \tag{\(*\)} \] The general solution of (\(*\)) is given: \(f\) satisfies (\(*\)) if and only if it is of the form \(f=A+Q+C+f(0)\), where \(A,Q,C: G\to V\) are additive, quadratic and cubic mappings, respectively. The main part of the paper is devoted to stability of (\(*\)). Replacing \(G\) by a normed space \(X\) and \(V\) by a Banach space \(Y\), it is proved that if \(f: X\to Y\) satisfies (with some \(\varepsilon\geq 0\)) \[ \|f(x)-4f(x+y)+6f(x+2y)-4f(x+3y)+f(x+4y)\|\leq \varepsilon \] on some subset of \(X^2\) separated from \((0,0)\) (four types of such a set are considered), then there exists a unique exact solution \(f_0\) of (\(*\)), such that \[ \|f(x)-f_0(x)\|\leq \frac{149}{63}\varepsilon,\quad x\in X. \] Corollaries and applications are also given, including some characterizations of inner product spaces.