e prove that, given any covering of any infinite-dimensional Hilbert space $H$ by countably many closed balls, some point exists in $H$ which belongs to infinitely many balls. We do that by characterizing isomorphically polyhedral separable Banach spaces as those whose unit sphere admits a point-finite covering by the union of countably many slices of the unit ball.

Let $T$ be a contraction on a complex, separable, infinite dimensional Hilbert space and let $\sigma \left( T\right) $ (resp. $\sigma _{e}\left( T\right) )$ be its spectrum (resp. essential spectrum). We assume that $T$ is an essentially isometric operator, that is $I_{H}-T^{\ast }T$ is compact. We show that if $D\diagdown \sigma \left( T\right) \neq \emptyset ,$ then for every $f$ from the disc-algebra, \begin{equation*} \sigma _{e}\left( f\left( T\right) \right) =f\left( \sigma _{e}\left( T\right) \right) , \end{equation*} where $D$ is the open unit disc. In addition, if $T$ lies in the class $ C_{0\cdot }\cup C_{\cdot 0},$ then \begin{equation*} \sigma _{e}\left( f\left( T\right) \right) =f\left( \sigma \left( T\right) \cap \Gamma \right) , \end{equation*} where $\Gamma $ is the unit circle. Some related problems are also discussed.

Some subadditivity inequalities for matrices and concave functions also hold for Hilbert space operators, but (unfortunately!) with an additional $\varepsilon$ term. It seems not possible to erase this residual term. However, in case of compact operators we show that the $\varepsilon$ term is unnecessary. Further, these inequalities are strict in a certain sense when some natural assumptions are satisfied. The discussion also stresses on matrices and their compressions and several open questions or conjectures are considered, both in the matrix and operator settings.

Let $(X,\mathcal B,\mu)$ be a $\sigma$-finite measure space and let $H\subset L^2(X,\mu)$ be a separable reproducing kernel Hilbert space on $X$. We show that the multiplier algebra of $H$ has property $(A_1(1))$.