The average distance property of classical Banach spaces II

A Banach space X has the average distance property if there exists a unique real number r such that for each positive integer n and all x1,…,xn in the unit sphere of X there is some x in the unit sphere of X such that We show that lp does not have the average distance property if p > 2. This completes the study of the average distance property for lp spaces.

The average distance property of classical Banach spaces

A Banach space X has the average distance property (ADP) if there exists a unique real number r such that for each positive integer n and all x1,…,xn in the unit sphere of X there is some x in the unit sphere of X such that .It is known that l2 and l∞ have the ADP, whereas lp fails to have the ADP if 1 ≤ p < 2. We show that lp also fails to have the ADP for 3 ≤ p ≤ ∞. Our method seems to be able to decide also the case 2 < p < 3, but the computational difficulties increase as p comes closer to 2.

On the average distance property in finite dimensional real Banach spaces

The average distance Theorem of Gross implies that for each N-dimensional real Banach space E (N ≥ 2) there is a unique positive real number r(E) with the following property: for each positive integer n and for all (not necessarily distinct) x1, x2, …, xn, in E with ‖x1‖ = ‖x2‖ = … = ‖xn‖ = 1, there exists an x in E with ‖x‖ = 1 such that.In this paper we prove that if E has a 1-unconditional basis then r(E)≤2−(l/N) and equality holds if and only if E is isometrically isomorphic to Rn equipped with the usual 1-norm.

Average distances in compact connected spaces

We give a simple proof of the fact that compact, connected topological spaces have the “average distance property”. For a metric space (X, d), this asserts the existence of a unique number a = a(X) such that, given finitely many points x1, …, xn ∈ X, then there is some y ∈ X withWe examine the possible values of a(X) , for subsets of finite dimensional normed spaces. For example, if diam(X) denotes the diameter of some compact, convex set in a euclidean space, then a(X) ≤ diam(X)/√2 . On the other hand, a(X)/diam(X) can be arbitrarily close to 1 , for non-convex sets in euclidean spaces of sufficiently large dimension.