Smooth and path connected Banach submanifold Σ r of B(E,F) and a dimension formula in B(? n ,? m )

Given two Banach spaces E,F, let B(E,F) be the set of all bounded linear operators from E into F, Σ _r the set of all operators of finite rank r in B(E,F), and Σ _r ^# the number of path connected components of Σ _r . It is known that Σ _r is a smooth Banach submanifold in B(E,F) with given expression of its tangent space at each A ∈ Σ _r . In this paper,the equality Σ _r ^# = 1 is proved. Consequently, the following theorem is obtained: for any nonnegative integer r, Σ _r is a smooth and path connected Banach submanifold in B(E,F) with the tangent space T _A Σ _r = {B ∈ B(E,F): BN(A) ⊂ R(A)} at each A ∈ Σ _r if dim F = ∞. Note that the routine method can hardly be applied here. So in addition to the nice topological and geometric property of Σ _r the method presented in this paper is also interesting. As an application of this result, it is proved that if E = ℝ ⁿ and F = ℝ ^m , then Σ _r is a smooth and path connected submanifold of B(ℝ ⁿ , ℝ ^m ) and its dimension is dimΣ _r = (m+n)r−r ² for each r, 0 <- r < min {n,m}. Supported by the National Science Foundation of China (Grant No.10671049 and 10771101).