Open-circuit time constant method

In functional analysis, a branch of mathematics, the Goldstine theorem, named after Herman Goldstine, asserts that the image of the closed unit ball $B_{X}$ of a Banach space $X$ under the canonical imbedding into the closed unit ball $B_{X^{**}}$ of the bidual space $X^{**}$ is weakly*-dense.

The conclusion of the theorem is not true for the norm topology, which can be seen by considering the Banach space of real sequences that converge to zero c₀, and its bi-dual space ℓ_∞.

Proof

Given an $x^{**}\in B_{X^{**}}$, a tuple $(\phi _{1},\dots ,\phi _{n})$ of linearly independent elements of $X^{*}$ and a $\delta >0$ we shall find an $x\in (1+\delta )B_{X}$ such that $\phi _{i}(x)=x^{**}(\phi _{i})$ for every $i=1,\dots ,n$.

If the requirement $\|x\|\leq 1+\delta$ is dropped, the existence of such an $x$ follows from the surjectivity of

$\Phi :X\to \mathbb {C} ^{n},x\mapsto (\phi _{1}(x),\dots ,\phi _{n}(x)).$

Let now $Y:=\bigcap _{i}\ker \phi _{i}=\ker \Phi$. Every element of $(x+Y)\cap (1+\delta )B_{X}$ has the required property, so that it suffices to show that the latter set is not empty.

Assume that it is empty. Then $\mathrm {dist} (x,Y)\geq 1+\delta$ and by the Hahn-Banach theorem there exists a linear form $\phi \in X^{*}$ such that $\phi |_{Y}=0$, $\phi (x)\geq 1+\delta$ and $\|\phi \|_{X^{*}}=1$. Then $\phi \in \mathrm {span} (\phi _{1},\dots ,\phi _{n})$ and therefore

$1+\delta \leq \phi (x)=x^{**}(\phi )\leq \|\phi \|_{X^{*}}\|x^{**}\|_{X^{**}}\leq 1,$

which is a contradiction.

See also

• Banach–Alaoglu theorem
• Bishop–Phelps theorem
• Eberlein–Šmulian theorem
• Mazur's lemma
• James' theorem