English

Banach's isometric subspace problem in dimension four

Metric Geometry 2023-11-28 v2

Abstract

We prove that if all intersections of a convex body BR4B\subset\mathbb R^4 with 3-dimensional linear subspaces are linearly equivalent then BB is a centered ellipsoid. This gives an affirmative answer to the case n=3n=3 of the following question by Banach from 1932: Is a normed vector space VV whose nn-dimensional linear subspaces are all isometric, for a fixed 2n<dimV2 \le n< \dim V, necessarily Euclidean? The dimensions n=3n=3 and dimV=4\dim V=4 is the first case where the question was unresolved. Since the 33-sphere is parallelizable, known global topological methods do not help in this case. Our proof employs a differential geometric approach.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2204.00936,
  title  = {Banach's isometric subspace problem in dimension four},
  author = {Sergei Ivanov and Daniil Mamaev and Anya Nordskova},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2204.00936},
  year   = {2023}
}

Comments

25 pages, v2: minor corrections and text improvements

R2 v1 2026-06-24T10:35:47.302Z