Detecting fixed points of nonexpansive maps by illuminating the unit ball

We give necessary and sufficient conditions for a nonexpansive map on a finite-dimensional normed space to have a nonempty, bounded set of fixed points. Among other results we show that if f: V → V is a nonexpansive map on a finite-dimensional normed space V, then the fixed point set of f is nonempty and bounded if and only if there exist w₁,..., w _m in V such that {f(w _i ) ? w _i : i = 1,..., m} illuminates the unit ball. This yields a numerical procedure for detecting fixed points of nonexpansive maps on finite-dimensional spaces. We also discuss applications of this procedure to certain nonlinear eigenvalue problems arising in game theory and mathematical biology.