Metrical characterization of super-reflexivity and linear type of Banach spaces

We prove that a Banach space X is not super-reflexive if and only if the hyperbolic infinite tree embeds metrically into X. We improve one implication of J.Bourgain’s result who gave a metrical characterization of super-reflexivity in Banach spaces in terms of uniform embeddings of the finite trees. A characterization of the linear type for Banach spaces is given using the embedding of the infinite tree equipped with the metrics d _p induced by the ℓ _p norms. Received: 2 August 2006, Revised: 10 April 2007