Embeddability, representability and universality involving Banach spaces

Abstract

Given a category of objects, it is both useful and important to know if all the objects in the category may be realised as sub-objects -- via morphisms in the given category -- of a single object in that category enjoying some nice properties. In the category of separable Banach spaces with morphisms consisting of linear isometries, such an example of (a universal) object is provided by the well-known Banach Mazur theorem: the space C[0,1] of continuous functions on the unit interval contains each separable Banach spaces as a closed subspace via a linear isometry. Here the question also arises if, as opposed to realising (separable) Banach spaces as spaces of continuous functions on [0, 1], it is possible to embed a Banach space as a subgroup of the group of linear isometries (resp. unitaries) on a nice Banach (resp. Hilbert) space. If such is the case, one says that the given Banach space is representable as a group of isometries (resp. unitaries). On the other hand, the idea of embeddability involves the possibility of realising each object in a given class of objects as included inside another object of the same class enjoying some good properties which are not present in the initial object. Further, considering that a Banach space also comes equipped with weaker structures involving the underlying metric (Lipschitz), uniform and topological structures, it follows that besides the linear isomorphisms (isometries), one may also consider morphisms in this category consisting of maps which are Lipschitz, uniformly continuous or continuous. This motivates the consideration of situations where it becomes necessary to know if a Banach space (resp a metric space) may be embedded in a nice Banach space as a metric, uniform or merely as a topological space.