Geometrical implications of upper semi-continuity of the duality mapping on a Banach space

Abstract

For the duality mapping on a Banach space the relation between lower semi-continuity and upper semi-continuity properties is explored, upper semi-continuity is characterized in terms of slices of the ball and upper semi-continuity properties are related to geometrical properties which imply that the space is an Asplund space. The duality mapping is a natural set-valued mapping from the unit sphere of a normed linear space into subsets of its dual sphere, and which for an inner product space is the mapping associating an element of the unit sphere with the corresponding continuous linear functional given by the inner product. It is an example of a subdifferential mapping of a continuous convex function (in this case, the norm), which is in turn a special kind of maximal monotone mapping. Cudia [4, p. 298] showed that the duality mapping is always upper semi-continuous when the space has the norm and the dual space has the weak* topology, and Kenderov [10, p. 67] extended this to maximal monotone mappings. Bonsall, Cain, and Schneider [3] used the property to prove the connectedness of the numerical range of an operator on a normed linear space. Along with the activity which culminated in StegalΓs theorem [15] characterizing an Asplund space as one whose dual has the Radon-Nikodym property, there has been some interest in finding geometrical conditions sufficient for a space to be Asplund. A Banach space X is an Asplund space if every continuous convex function defined on an open convex subset of X is strongly differentiate on a dense Gδ subset of its domain. Ekeland and Lebourg [6, p. 204] have shown that a Banach space is Asplund if there exists a strongly differentiate real function on the space with bounded nonempty support, in particular, if the space can be equivalently renormed to have norm strongly differentiable on the unit sphere. Using StegalΓs theorem, a result of Diestel and Faires [5, p. 625] gives that a Banach space is Asplund if the space can be equivalently renormed to be very smooth, that is, to be smooth and to have the single valued duality mapping continuous when the space has the norm and the dual space has the weak topology. Recently Smith and Sullivan [13, Theorem 15] have exhibited a more general condition which is sufficient for a Banach space to be Asplund. We show that