We survey some questions on Rademacher series in both Banach and quasi-Banach spaces which have been the subject of extensive research from the time of Orlicz to the present day.

We show that, given an n-dimensional normed space X, a sequence of $N={(8/\epsilon )}^{2n}$ independent random vectors ${\left(X_i\right)}_{i=1}^N$, uniformly distributed in the unit ball of X*, with high probability forms an ε-net for this unit ball. Thus the random linear map $\Gamma :ℝ\to {ℝ}^N$ defined by $\Gamma x={(⟨x,X_i⟩)}_{i=1}^N$ embeds X in ${\ell }_{\infty }^N$ with at most 1 + ε norm distortion. In the case X = ℓ₂ⁿ we obtain a random 1+ε-embedding into ${\ell }_{\infty }^N$ with asymptotically best possible relation between N, n, and ε.

We present a general result on regularization of an arbitrary convex body (and more generally a star body), which gives and extends global forms of a number of well known local facts, like the low M*-estimates, large Euclidean sections of finite volume-ratio spaces and others.