Equality in Triangle inequality in a normed vectorial space (not inner product space)

normed-spacestriangle-inequality

In a real inner product space $(E,<\cdot|\cdot>)$, if we note $||\cdot ||$ the associated norm, we have equality in the triangle equality, i.e. $||x+y||=||x||+||y||$, if and only if there exists $\lambda, \mu \in \mathbb{R}^+, \lambda x = \mu y$.

But is it still true in a normed vectorial space, where we can not associate a dot product ?

In fact in the proof for real inner product spaces, we use Cauchy-Schwarz, but since there is no dot product here, I can't see how I could prove it, if true.

Thanks in advance

Best Answer

Let $\|x\|_1 := |x_1| + |x_2|$ be the $\ell_1$ norm on $\mathbb{R}^2$. Then the triangle inequality attains equality for $x=(1,0)$ and $y=(0,1)$ despite $x$ and $y$ not being parallel.

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