Are $c_0$ and $c$ duals of some spaces

banach-spacesdual-spacesfunctional-analysislp-spacesnormed-spaces

The (continuous) dual of a normed vector space is always a Banach space, but the converse is not true. That is, not all Banach spaces are isomorphic to the dual space of some normed vector space. For instance $L^1$ is not isomorphic to any dual space.

My question is, are the sequence spaces $c_0$ and $c$ isomorphic to the duals of any spaces?

Best Answer

$c_0$ is not the dual of some normed vector space.

sketch of proof:

This can be proven using the Krein-Milman theorem.

If $c_0$ was the dual of a normed vector space, then its unit ball would be weakly-* compact.

However, it can be shown that the unit ball of $c_0$ has no extremal points, therefore by Krein-Milman it is not weakly-* compact.

edit: for $c$ the situation is more complicated than I initially thought.

As uniquesolution pointed out in the comments, its unit ball has many extreme points, and it is not clear to me if Krein-Milman can be used to show that the unit ball of $c$ cannot be weakly-* compact.

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