Commutative, radical amenable Banach algebras
There has been a considerable search for radical, amenable Banach algebras. Noncommutative examples were finally found by Volker Runde [R]; here we present the first commutative examples. Centrally placed within the construction, the reader may be pleased to notice a reprise of the undergraduate argument that shows that a normed space with totally bounded unit ball is finite-dimensional; we use the same idea (approximate the norm 1 vector x within distance η by a “good” vector ; then approximate...