Stability Constants and the Homology of Quasi-Banach Spaces
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Stability constants and the homology of quasi-Banach spaces F¶elixCabello S¶anchez and Jes¶usM. F. Castillo Abstract. We a±rmatively solve the main problems posed by Laczkovich and Paulin in Stability constants in linear spaces, Constructive Approximation 34 (2011) 89{106 (do there exist cases in which the second Whitney constant is ¯nite while the approximation constant is in¯nite?) and by Cabello and Castillo in The long homol- ogy sequence for quasi-Banach spaces, with applications, Positivity 8 (2004) 379{394 (do there exist Banach spaces X; Y for which Ext(X; Y ) is Hausfdor® and non-zero?). In fact, we show that these two problems are the same. AMS (2010) Class. Number. 41A30, 46B20, 46M15, 46M18, 46A16, 26B25, 52A05, 46B08. 1. Introduction In this paper we solve the main problems posed [2] and in [11]. This introductory section is devoted to explain the problems and the solutions we present. The reader is addressed to Section 2 for all unexplained terms and notation. The underlying idea of [2] was to study the spaces Ext(X; Y ) of exact sequences of quasi-Banach spaces 0 ! Y ! Z ! X ! 0 by means of certain nonlinear maps F : X ! Y called quasilinear maps. In that paper we introduced (semi-quasi-normed) linear topologies in the spaces Ext(X; Y ). Such topologies are completely natural in this setting since they make continuous all the linear maps appearing in the associ- ated homology sequences. We encountered considerable di±culties in studying the Hausdor® character of Ext(X; Y ) for arbitrary spaces X; Y , although we managed to produce some pairs of quasi-Banach spaces X and Y for which Ext(X; Y ) is (nonzero and) Hausdor®. Those examples invariably required that L(X; Y ) = 0, which is im- possible in a Banach space context. Thus the main problem left open in [2, p. 387] was to know if there are Banach spaces X and Y for which Ext(X; Y ) is nonzero and This research has been supported in part by project MTM2010-20190-C02-01 and the program Junta de Extremadura GR10113 IV Plan Regional I+D+i, Ayudas a Grupos de Investigaci¶on. 1 2 FELIX¶ CABELLO SANCHEZ¶ AND JESUS¶ M. F. CASTILLO Hausdor®. We will show in this paper that this is indeed the case. This paper also solves the main problem in [11]. In fact, it was this problem who suggested us the approach of the present paper and the \form" that the examples in Section 6 had to have. In [11] Laczkovich and Paulin studied the stability of approx- imately a±ne and Jensen functions on convex sets of linear spaces. They show that, in many respects, it is enough to work the case where the convex set is the unit ball of a Banach space. Reduced to its basic elements the main problem in [11] can be stated as follows. Let B a convex set and Y a Banach space. A function f : B ! Y is approximately a±ne if kf(tx + (1 ¡ t)y) ¡ tf(x) ¡ (1 ¡ t)f(y)kY · 1 for every x; y 2 D and every t 2 [0; 1]. Suppose there is a constant A0 = A0(B; Y ) such that for every bounded approximately a±ne function f : B ! Y there is a true a±ne function a : B ! Y such that kf(x) ¡ a(x)k · A0 for every x 2 B. Does it follow that for every (in general unbounded) approximately a±ne function f : B ! Y there is an a±ne function a such that supx2B kf(x) ¡ a(x)k < 1? We show in Section 8 that the Examples in Section 6 provide a negative answer to this problem. The idea is that if B is the unit ball of X, then every approximately a±ne function f : B ! Y is (up to a bounded perturbation) the restriction of some quasilinear map F : X ! Y . Thus A0(B; Y ) and K0(X; Y ) are nearly proportional and so, it su±ces to get a pair of Banach spaces with K0(X; Y ) ¯nite but admitting a nontrivial quasilinear map F : X ! Y . Let us describe the organization of the paper. Section 2 is preliminary: it contains the necessary background on quasilinear maps and extensions. In Section 3 we give a seemingly new representation of Ext(X; Y ), we denote by Ext$(X; Y ), which is based on a relatively projective presentation of X and carries a natural topology. Section 4 is devoted to show that the \old" functor Ext and the \new" functor Ext$ are naturally equivalent, both algebraically and topologically. In Section 5 we give the basic criterion to determine when Ext(X; Y ) is Hausdor®. It turns out that Ext(X; Y ) is Hausdor® if and only if a certain parameter K0(X; Y ) (depending only on the behavior of the bounded quasilinear maps F : X ! Y ) is ¯nite. In Section 6 we arrive to the main counter-examples: we show that Ext(X; Y ) is nonzero and Hausdor® if, for instance, X = `p(I) with 1 < p < 1 and I uncountable and Y = c0 is the space of all null sequences with the sup norm. The results of Section 7 con¯rm that Ext(X; Y ) has a quite strong tendency to not being Hausdor®. The paper has been organized so that the interested reader can go straight to the solution of Laczkovich-Paulin problem. The shortest path is to read ¯rst Sections 2.2 and 2.3, then Section 6 and ¯nally Section 8. STABILITY CONSTANTS AND THE HOMOLOGY OF QUASI-BANACH SPACES 3 2. Background on quasilinear maps and extensions of quasi-Banach spaces 2.1. Notation. Let X be a (real or complex) linear space. A semi quasi-norm is a function % : X ! R+ satisfying the following conditions: (a) %(¸x) = j¸j%(x) for every x 2 X and every scalar ¸. (b) There is a constant ¢ such that %(x + y) · ¢(%(x) + %(y)) for every x; y 2 X. A semi quasi-normed space is a linear space furnished X with a semi quasi-norm % which gives rise to a linear topology, namely the least linear topology for which the set BX = fx 2 X : %(x) · 1g is a neighborhood of the origin. A semi quasi-Banach space is a complete semi quasi-normed space. If %(x) = 0 implies x = 0, then % is said to be a quasi-norm and X is Hausdor®. Throughout the paper we denote by ¢% (or ¢X if there is no risk of confusion) the modulus of concavity of (X; %), that is, the least constant ¢ for which (b) holds. Let X and Y be quasi-Banach spaces. A mapping F : X ! Y is said to be homogeneous if F (¸x) = ¸F (x) for every scalar ¸ and every x 2 X. A homogeneous map F is bounded if there is a constant C such that kF (x)kY · CkxkX for all x 2 X; equivalently if it is uniformly bounded on the unit ball. We write kF k for the least constant C for which the preceding inequality holds. Clearly, kF k = supkxk·1 kF (x)k. This is coherent with the standard notation for the (quasi-) norm of a linear operator. 2.2. Quasilinear maps. Let X and Y be quasi-Banach spaces. A map F : X ! Y is said to be quasilinear if it is homogeneous and satis¯es an estimate (1) kF (x + y) ¡ F (x) ¡ F (y)kY · Q (kxkX + kykX ) for some constant Q and all x; y 2 X. The smallest constant Q above shall be denoted by Q(F ). All linear maps, continuous or not, are quasilinear and so are the bounded (homo- geneous) maps. Let us say that a quasilinear map F is trivial if it is the sum of a linear map L and a bounded homogeneous map B. This happens if and only F is at ¯nite \distance" from L in the sense that kF ¡ Lk < 1. Let us introduce the \approximation constants" for quasilinear maps as follows. Definition 1. Given quasi-Banach spaces X and Y we denote by K0(X; Y ) the in¯mum of those constants C for which the following statement is true: if F : X ! Y is a bounded quasilinear map, then there is a linear map L : X ! Y such that kF ¡ Lk · CQ(F ). We de¯ne K(X; Y ) analogously just omitting the word `bounded'. Observe that K0(X; Y ) does not vary if we replace \bounded" by \trivial" in the de¯nition. 4 FELIX¶ CABELLO SANCHEZ¶ AND JESUS¶ M. F. CASTILLO 2.3. Twisted sums. The link between quasilinear maps and the homology of (quasi-) Banach spaces is the following construction, due to Kalton [6] and Ribe [13]. Suppose F : X ! Y is quasilinear. We consider the product space Y £ X and we furnish it with the following quasinorm: k(y; x)kF = ky ¡ F (x)kY + kxkX : Following a long standing tradition, we denote the resulting quasi-Banach space by Y ©F X. It is obvious that the operator { : Y ! Y ©F X sending y to (y; 0) is an isometric embedding, so we may regard Y as a subspace of Y ©F X. The connection between X and Y ©F X is less obvious. Consider the operator ¼ : Y ©F X ! X de¯ned by ¼(y; x) = x. We have k¼k · 1, by the very de¯nition of the quasi-norm in Y ©F X. Besides, ¼ maps the unit ball of Y ©F X onto the unit ball of X since ¼(F (x); x) = x and k(F (x); x)kF = kxkX .