Balanced and absorbing subsets with empty interior

Abstract

Abstract Our first result says that every real or complex infinite-dimensional normed space has an unbounded absolutely convex and absorbing subset with empty interior. As a consequence, a real normed space is finite-dimensional if and only if every convex subset containing 0 whose linear span is the whole space has non-empty interior. In our second result we prove that every real or complex separable normed space with dimension greater than 1 contains a balanced and absorbing subset with empty interior which is dense in the unit ball. Explicit constructions of these subsets are given.