Martingales with values in uniformly convex spaces

Using the techniques of martingale inequalities in the case of Banach space valued martingales, we give a new proof of a theorem of Enflo: every super-reflexive space admits an equivalent uniformly convex norm. Letr be a number in ]2, ∞; we prove moreover that if a Banach spaceX is uniformly convex (resp. ifδ _x(?)/? ^r when? → 0) thenX admits for someq<∞ (resp. for someq<r) an equivalent norm for which the corresponding modulus of convexity satisfiesδ(?)/? ^q → ∞ when? → 0. These results have dual analogues concerning the modulus of smoothness. Our method is to study some inequalities for martingales with values in super-reflexive or uniformly convex spaces which are characteristic of the geometry of these spaces up to isomorphism.