Past exam of the mathematics course of the University of Cambridge 2010 iii Paper 6 2 iii Solution Created 2026-10-03 Updated 2026-10-14
False. Take the separable Banach space , whose continuous dual space is . We prove that first countability of the weak unit ball would force this dual to be norm separable, producing a contradiction.
Suppose that had a countable weak neighbourhood base at zero. Inside each , choose a basic relative weak neighbourhood specified by finitely many continuous linear functionals . The union is countable. For any and , some lies in . On the vector subspacethis implies , by scaling vectors into . The Hahn-Banach theorem extends to with . The functional vanishes on and is therefore a linear combination of : it factors through the finite-dimensional coordinate map , and a linear functional on that map's image extends to the finite-dimensional coordinate space. HenceEvery thus belongs to the norm closure of . Taking rational coefficients, or rational real and imaginary parts, gives a countable norm-dense subset of . This proves that weak-ball metrizability requires a norm-separable dual.
For , every bounded sequence defines with . Conversely, the values of any bounded linear functional determine such a sequence and recover by density of finitely supported vectors. Thus . The uncountable family in has distance one between distinct members, so this dual is not norm separable: disjoint balls of radius less than would require distinct members of any countable dense set. Since every metrizable space is first countable, the weak unit ball of is not metrizable.