A history of solving some famous problems in mathematical analysis

Abstract

This paper provides a historical view of what functional analysis is, a biography of Per H. Enflo and a short view of four fundamental problems in the geometry of Banach spaces. It gives the story of how Enflo, after several years of work, managed to solve three of these problems. It is a story of trying many ideas, testing them on simpler problems, trying to combine different techniques for handling different aspects of the problems, making many failed attempts and finally succeeding. In 1966 Enflo found a general strategy for solving many problems in infinite dimensions, by combining appropriate finite-dimensional techniques with induction procedures. When applied to the old, fundamental problems in functional analysis, this has led to new concepts, problems, techniques and results in analysis. These developments have been applied also in several other areas of mathematics and computer science.