Positive forms on Banach spaces

The first representation theorem establishes a correspondence between positive, self-adjoint operators and closed, positive forms on Hilbert spaces. The aim of this paper is to show that some of the results remain true if the underlying space is a reflexive Banach space. In particular, the construction of the Friedrichs extension and the form sum of positive operators can be carried over to this case. This revised version was published online in June 2006 with corrections to the Cover Date.