The Johnson–Lindenstrauss Lemma Almost Characterizes Hilbert Space, But Not Quite

Let X be a normed space that satisfies the Johnson–Lindenstrauss lemma (J–L lemma, in short) in the sense that for any integer n and any x ₁,…,x _n ∈X, there exists a linear mapping L:X→F, where F⊆X is a linear subspace of dimension O(log n), such that ‖x _i −x _j ‖≤‖L(x _i )−L(x _j )‖≤O(1)⋅‖x _i −x _j ‖ for all i,j∈{1,…,n}. We show that this implies that X is almost Euclidean in the following sense: Every n-dimensional subspace of X embeds into Hilbert space with distortion 2^2O(log*n)2^{2^{O(\log^{*}n)}} . On the other hand, we show that there exists a normed space Y which satisfies the J–L lemma, but for every n, there exists an n-dimensional subspace E _n ⊆Y whose Euclidean distortion is at least 2^Ω(α(n)), where α is the inverse Ackermann function.