Institution: | Department of Mathematics and Statistics, Miami University, Oxford, Ohio 45056 ; Department of Mathematics, Texas A&M University, College Station, Texas 77843 ; Department of Mathematics and Statistics, University of Pittsburgh, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania 15260 ; Department of Mathematical Sciences, Oakland University, Rochester, Michigan 48309 |
Abstract: | A renorming of , explored here in detail, shows that the copies of produced in the proof of the Kadec-Pelczynski theorem inside nonreflexive subspaces of cannot be produced inside general nonreflexive spaces that contain copies of . Put differently, James's distortion theorem producing one-plus-epsilon-isomorphic copies of inside any isomorphic copy of is, in a certain sense, optimal. A similar renorming of shows that James's distortion theorem for is likewise optimal. |