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Questions designed to generate a "big list" of certain results, examples, conjectures, etc. via many individual answers, each contributing one or a few instances. Such a question should typically be in Community Wiki mode (CW); after asking, please, flag for moderators attention requesting the question to be made CW.

4 votes

Prominent non-mathematical work of mathematicians

Per Enflo is famous for solving Banach's basis problem, Grothendieck's approximation problem, and the invariant subspace problem for general Banach spaces, and has other fundamental research in linear …
Bill Johnson's user avatar
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23 votes

Quick proofs of hard theorems

Lomonosov's 1973 proof that every compact operator $T$ has a hyperinvariant subspace (i.e., a subspace that is invariant for every operator that commutes with $T$) was much simpler than proofs existin …
Martin Sleziak's user avatar
9 votes

Fixed point theorems

I forgot who proved it, but the statement is nice and very easy to prove: A function $f:X\to X$ is fixed point free if and only if there is a partition of $X$ into three subsets s.t. $f$ maps each of …
Bill Johnson's user avatar
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5 votes

Interesting examples of generic behavior of mathematical objects being either unreasonably s...

Their are many such examples in the theory of finite dimensional Banach spaces. Suppose that $X$ is an $n$ dimensional Banach space. If you take a random subspace of dimension $k$, then for some value …
Bill Johnson's user avatar
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17 votes

Are there proofs that you feel you did not "understand" for a long time?

The proof that the trace is well defined for square matrices looked like symbol pushing to me. Many years later I realized that the proof is nonsense if you live in certain infinite dimensional world …
Bill Johnson's user avatar
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6 votes

Fundamental problems whose solution seems completely out of reach

Is every complemented subspace of $C[0.1]$ isomorphic to $C(K)$ for some compact metric space $K$? Is every infinite dimensional complemented subspace of $L_1[0.1]$ isomorphic either to $L_1[0.1]$ or …
Bill Johnson's user avatar
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6 votes
Accepted

Do (Banach) ultrapowers carry some sort of 'elementary equivalence'?

Say that a Banach space $X$ has property $K$ (for Kummers) provided every subspace of $X$ that is isomorphic to $X$ is complemented. The classical separable, infinite dimensional spaces that have pro …
Bill Johnson's user avatar
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0 votes

Awfully sophisticated proof for simple facts

If $0\le f_n \le 1$ is a sequence of continuous functions on $[0,1]$ that converges pointwise to $0$, then $\int_0^1 f_n(t) dt $ converges to $0$. Understandable by freshman, the statement is hard to …
Bill Johnson's user avatar
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3 votes

Applications of Brouwer's fixed point theorem

One standard consequence of Brouwer's theorem is Borsuk's antipodal mapping theorem, which in turn is used to prove that if $E$, $F$ are subspaces of a normed space and the dimension of $E$ is strictl …
Bill Johnson's user avatar
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21 votes
Accepted

A book you would like to write

Gosh, what a question, Gil. What is your answer? I have written many books in my head, but I am much too lazy actually to write a book. I guess my first choice would be Geometric nonlinear function …
Bill Johnson's user avatar
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2 votes

Individual mathematical objects whose study amounts to a (sub)discipline?

$C[0,1]$. Since every separable metric space embeds isometrically into $C[0,1]$ and every separable Banach space embeds isometrically isomorphically into $C[0,1]$, the study of $C[0,1]$ includes the …
Bill Johnson's user avatar
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37 votes

Proofs of the uncountability of the reals

Alternatively, Prove that the reals are connected. Prove that every countable dense subset $X$ of the reals must be order isomorphic to the rationals. Prove that the rationals are not connected.
Bill Johnson's user avatar
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19 votes

Theorems first published in textbooks?

It happened to me once. While visiting the Institute for Advanced Studies at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem in 1976-77 I answered a question from the preliminary manuscript of volume 1 of Lindens …
Bill Johnson's user avatar
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29 votes

Why do we care about $L^p$ spaces besides $p = 1$, $p = 2$, and $p = \infty$?

Tim, here is one very specific example that a computer scientist who cares only about $L_1$ and $L_2$ should find appealing. The norm of $\ell_1^n$ is, up to a constant, the same as the $\ell_p^n$ no …
Bill Johnson's user avatar
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7 votes

Mathematicians who were late learners?-list

R. H. Bing taught high school for several years before entering graduate school.
Bill Johnson's user avatar
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