Retraction of a Hilbert ball onto its sphere

ID: retraction-of-a-hilbert-ball-onto-its-sphere

The closed unit ball in the infinite-dimensional real Hilbert space admits a retraction onto its unit sphere. Write for the forward unilateral shift operator and set . Then and : equality would force all coordinates of to coincide, hence vanish, contradicting .
For , set
The nonvanishing denominator makes a continuous map. Expanding its squared norm gives . On , the fraction is one, so . Thus the finite-dimensional no-retraction theorem does not extend to this closed unit ball.

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