On Some Types of Rigid Sets in Banach Spaces

One of the properties characterizing Euclidean spaces says - roughly speaking- that their unit sphere has nice invariant properties. More precisely, a finite dimensional normed space has an Euclidean norm if and only if the group of isometries acts transitively on its unit sphere (the norm is “transitive”); such property of the sphere is also called “rigidity”. More recently, another notion of “rigidity” for compact sets, connected with “isometric sequences”, received some attention. Infinite rigid sets are diametral; moreover, under suitable assumptions on the space, they are also contained in the boundary of a sphere. These notions are connected with many problems, in different areas. Here we discuss and compare these two notions of rigid set, trying to indicate new relations among them and with some other properties of sets. Several examples complete the paper.