The study carried out in this paper about some new examples of Banach spaces, consisting of certain valued fields extensions, is a typical non-archimedean feature. We determine whether these extensions are of countable type, have $t$-orthogonal bases, or are reflexive. As an application we construct, for a class of base fields, a norm $\|\cdot\|$ on $c_0$, equivalent to the canonical supremum norm, without non-zero vectors that are $\|\cdot\|$-orthogonal and such that there is a multiplication on $c_0$ making $(c_0,\|\cdot\|)$ into a valued field.

The notion of a maximally conditional sequence is introduced for sequences in a Banach space. It is then proved using Ramsey theory that every basic sequence in a Banach space has a subsequence which is either an unconditional basic sequence or a maximally conditional sequence. An apparently novel, purely combinatorial lemma in the spirit of Galvin's theorem is used in the proof. An alternative proof of the dichotomy result for sequences in Banach spaces is also sketched, using the Galvin-Prikry theorem.

Let $B_Y$ denote the unit ball of a normed linear space $Y$. A symmetric, bounded, closed, convex set $A$ in a finite dimensional normed linear space $X$ is called a sufficient enlargement for $X$ if, for an arbitrary isometric embedding of $X$ into a Banach space $Y$, there exists a linear projection $P\colon Y\to X$ such that $P(B_Y)\subset A$. Each finite dimensional normed space has a minimal-volume sufficient enlargement that is a parallelepiped; some spaces have ``exotic'' minimal-volume sufficient enlargements. The main result of the paper is a characterization of spaces having ``exotic'' minimal-volume sufficient enlargements in terms of Auerbach bases.

It is proved that every infinite-dimensional non-archimedean Banach space of countable type admits a linear continuous operator without a non-trivial closed invariant subspace. This solves a problem stated by A.~C.~M. van Rooij and W.~H. Schikhof in 1992.

A new semilocal convergence result for the Picard method is presented, where the main required condition in the contraction mapping principle is relaxed.

Given a centrally symmetric convex body $B$ in $\E^d,$ we denote by $\M^d(B)$ the Minkowski space ({\em i.e.,} finite dimensional Banach space) with unit ball $B.$ Let $K$ be an arbitrary convex body in $\M^d(B).$ The relationship between volume $V(K)$ and the Minkowskian thickness ($=$ minimal width) $\thns_B(K)$ of $K$ can naturally be given by the sharp geometric inequality $V(K) \ge \alpha(B) \cdot \thns_B(K)^d,$ where $\alpha(B)>0.$ As a simple corollary of the Rogers--Shephard inequality we obtain that $\binom{2d}{d}{}^{-1} \le \alpha(B)/V(B) \le 2^{-d}$ with equality on the left attained if and only if $B$ is the difference body of a simplex and on the right if $B$ is a cross-polytope. The main result of this paper is that for $d=2$ the equality on the right implies that $B$ is a parallelogram. The obtained results yield the sharp upper bound for the modified Banach--Mazur distance to the regular hexagon.

In this paper we consider collections of compact operators on a real or complex Banach space including linear operators on finite-dimensional vector spaces. We show that such a collection is simultaneously triangularizable if and only if it is arbitrarily close to a simultaneously triangularizable collection of compact operators. As an application of these results we obtain an invariant subspace theorem for certain bounded operators. We further prove that in finite dimensions near reducibility implies reducibility whenever the ground field is $\BR$ or $\BC$.

We show a result slightly more general than the following. Let $K$ be a compact Hausdorff space, $F$ a closed subset of $K$, and $d$ a lower semi-continuous metric on $K$. Then each continuous function $f$ on $F$ which is Lipschitz in $d$ admits a continuous extension on $K$ which is Lipschitz in $d$. The extension has the same supremum norm and the same Lipschitz constant. As a corollary we get that a Banach space $X$ is reflexive if and only if each bounded, weakly continuous and norm Lipschitz function defined on a weakly closed subset of $X$ admits a weakly continuous, norm Lipschitz extension defined on the entire space $X$.

Every weakly compact composition operator between weighted Banach spaces $H_v^{\infty}$ of analytic functions with weighted sup-norms is compact. Lower and upper estimates of the essential norm of continuous composition operators are obtained. The norms of the point evaluation functionals on the Banach space $H_v^{\infty}$ are also estimated, thus permitting to get new characterizations of compact composition operators between these spaces.