Onp-absolutely summing constants of banach spaces

Given 1≦p<∞ and a real Banach spaceX, we define thep-absolutely summing constantμ _p(X) as inf{Σ _i ^=1/m |x*(x _i)|^p p Σ _i ^=1/m ‖x _i‖^p p]¹ p}, where the supremum ranges over {x*∈X*; ‖x*‖≤1} and the infimum is taken over all sets {x ₁,x ₂, …,x _m} ⊂X such that Σ _i ^=1/m ‖x _i‖>0. It follows immediately from 2] thatμ _p(X)>0 if and only ifX is finite dimensional. In this paper we find the exact values ofμ _p(X) for various spaces, and obtain some asymptotic estimates ofμ _p(X) for general finite dimensional Banach spaces. This is a part of the author’s Ph.D. Thesis prepared at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, under the supervision of Prof. A. Dvoretzky and Prof. J. Lindenstrauss.