# Asymptotic structure of banach spaces

Dew, N. (2003) Asymptotic structure of banach spaces. PhD thesis, University of Oxford.

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## Abstract

The notion of asymptotic structure of an infinite dimensional Banach space was introduced by Maurey, Milman and Tomczak-Jaegermann. The asymptotic structure consists of those finite dimensional spaces which can be found everywhere at infinity'. These are defined as the spaces for which there is a winning strategy in a certain vector game. The above authors introduced the class of asymptotic spaces, which are the spaces having simplest possible asymptotic structure. Key examples of such spaces are Tsirelson's space and James' space. We prove some new properties of general asymptotic spaces and also compare the notion of asymptotic with other notions of asymptotic Hilbert space behaviour such as weak Hilbert and asymptotically Hilbertian.

We study some properties of smooth functions defined on subsets of asymptotic spaces. Using these results we show that that an asymptotic space which has a suitably smooth norm is isomorphically polyhedral, and therefore admits an equivalent analytic norm. We give a sufficient condition for a generalized Orlicz space to be a stabilized asymptotic space, and hence obtain some new examples of asymptotic spaces. We also show that every generalized Orlicz space which is stabilized asymptotic is isomorphically polyhedral.

In 1991 Gowers and Maurey constructed the first example of a space which did not contain an unconditional basic sequence. In fact their example had a stronger property, namely that it was hereditarily indecomposable. The space they constructed was -like' in the sense that for any successive vectors , where . We present an adaptation of this construction to obtain, for each , an hereditarily indecomposable Banach space, which is `-like' in the sense described above.

We give some sufficient conditions on the set of types, , for a Banach space to contain almost isometric copies of (for some ) or of . These conditions involve compactness of certain subsets of in the strong topology. The proof of these results relies heavily on spreading model techniques. We give two examples of classes of spaces which satisfy these conditions. The first class of examples
were introduced by Kalton, and have a structural property known as Property (M). The second class of examples are certain generalized Tsirelson spaces.

We introduce the class of stopping time Banach spaces which generalize a space introduced by Rosenthal and first studied by Bang and Odell. We look at subspaces of these spaces which are generated by sequences of independent random variables and we show that they are isomorphic to (generalized) Orlicz spaces. We deduce also that every Orlicz space, , embeds isomorphically in the stopping time Banach space of Rosenthal. We show also, by using a suitable independence condition, that stopping time Banach spaces also contain subspaces isomorphic to mixtures of Orlicz spaces.

Item Type: Thesis (PhD) A - C > Approximations and expansionsD - G > Functional analysis Functional Analysis Group 49 Eprints Administrator 12 Mar 2004 29 May 2015 18:15

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