Weak additivity of metric pythagorean orthogonality

Abstract

It is well known that the property of additivity of pythagorean orthogonality characterizes real inner product spaces among normed linear spaces. In the present paper, a natural concept of additivity is introduced in metric spaces, and it is shown that a weakened version of this additivity of metric pythagorean orthogonality characterizes real inner product spaces among complete, convex, externally convex metric spaces, providing a generalization of the earlier characterization.