A product of three projections
Volume 223 / 2014
Abstract
Let $X$ and $Y$ be two closed subspaces of a Hilbert space. If we send a point back and forth between them by orthogonal projections, the iterates converge to the projection of the point onto the intersection of $X$ and $Y$ by a theorem of von Neumann.
Any sequence of orthoprojections of a point in a Hilbert space onto a finite family of closed subspaces converges weakly, according to Amemiya and Ando. The problem of norm convergence was open for a long time. Recently Adam Paszkiewicz constructed five subspaces of an infinite-dimensional Hilbert space and a sequence of projections on them which does not converge in norm. We construct three such subspaces, resolving the problem fully. As a corollary we observe that the Lipschitz constant of a certain Whitney-type extension does in general depend on the dimension of the underlying space.
