MathOverflow will be down for maintenance for approximately 3 hours, starting Monday evening (06/24/2013) at approximately 9:00 PM Eastern time (UTC-4).
show/hide this revision's text 2 Add reference.

It is a famous problem (due to Banach and Mazur) whether a separable infinite dimensional Banach space which has a transitive isometry group must be isometrically isomorphic to a Hilbert space. Of course, if every two dimensional subspace has a transitive isometry group, then the space is a Hilbert space since then the norm satisfies the parallelogram identity. For counterexamples in the non separable setting, consider the $\ell_p$ sum of uncountably many copies of $L_p(0,1)$ with $p$ not $2$.

For a recent paper related to the Banach-Mazur rotation problem, which contains some other references related to the problem, see

http://arxiv.org/abs/math/0110202.

show/hide this revision's text 1

It is a famous problem whether a separable infinite dimensional Banach space which has a transitive isometry group must be isometrically isomorphic to a Hilbert space. Of course, if every two dimensional subspace has a transitive isometry group, then the space is a Hilbert space since then the norm satisfies the parallelogram identity. For counterexamples in the non separable setting, consider the $\ell_p$ sum of uncountably many copies of $L_p(0,1)$ with $p$ not $2$.