Banach-Saks property 2026-10-14
A Banach space has the Banach-Saks property if every bounded sequence contains a subsequence whose arithmetic averages converge in norm. The weak Banach-Saks property requires this only for weakly convergent sequences. The weak Banach–Saks theorem in a Hilbert space establishes that weak version in Hilbert spaces.
By weakly convergent sequence is bounded, is finite. Choose any . Once have been chosen, put . Since is fixed, weak convergence to zero gives . Choose with . This gives the required one-sided inequality as well.
The useful estimate is for the squared norm. Indeed, , and the inner product expansion gives
By mathematical induction, . Hence
This proves norm convergence of the averages, the weak Banach–Saks theorem in a Hilbert space. The printed inequality omits the square on its left side. Our stronger estimate also proves that printed bound, since for , but the printed bound alone only bounds the averages and cannot imply their norm convergence to zero.
First suppose the convex set is closed in the norm topology, and satisfies . Apply the weak Banach–Saks theorem in a Hilbert space to the weakly null sequence . Along the resulting subsequence,
in norm. Each is a convex combination of points in , so . Since is a closed set in the norm topology, .
Conversely, suppose is a sequentially weakly closed set. If in the norm topology, choose with . The Cauchy-Schwarz inequality gives for every , hence weak convergence to . The assumed closure property gives . The empty set satisfies both properties too. Thus
The hypothesis says exactly that in the Hilbert space . We give the constructive weak Banach–Saks theorem in a Hilbert space argument. Choose inductively so that, for ,
This is possible because each earlier is an admissible test variable in the weak-convergence assumption. Since ,
Therefore
A subset of a normed space is sequentially weakly closed when every weakly convergent sequence in has its limit in . Every weakly closed set has this property. For a convex set in a Banach space, it is equivalent to closure in the norm topology: Mazur lemma produces norm convergent convex combinations from any weakly convergent sequence, and conversely norm convergence implies weak convergence. For a Hilbert space, the weak Banach–Saks theorem in a Hilbert space supplies these convex combinations as subsequence averages. No equivalence with weak closedness is asserted here for arbitrary nonconvex sets.