Stability in the Banach isometric conjecture and nearly monochromatic Finsler surfaces

Abstract

The Banach isometric conjecture asserts that a normed space with all of its $k$-dimensional subspaces isometric, where $k\ge 2$, is Euclidean. The first case of $k=2$ is classical, established by Auerbach, Mazur and Ulam using an elegant topological argument. We refine their method to arrive at a stable version of their result: if all $2$-dimensional subspaces are almost isometric, then the space is almost Euclidean. Furthermore, we show that a $2$-dimensional surface, which is not a torus or a Klein bottle, equipped with a near-monochromatic Finsler metric, is approximately Riemannian. The stability is quantified explicitly using the Banach-Mazur distance.

Minor corrections and improvements to exposition, 3 figures added