Motivated by Altshuler’s famous characterization of the unit vector basis of $c_0$ or $\ell _p$ among symmetric bases (Altshuler [1976, Israel Journal of Mathematics, 24, 39–44]), we obtain similar characterizations among democratic bases and among bidemocratic bases. We also prove a separate characterization of the unit vector basis of $\ell _1$ .

For $1\le p <\infty $ , we present a reflexive Banach space $\mathfrak {X}^{(p)}_{\text {awi}}$ , with an unconditional basis, that admits $\ell _p$ as a unique asymptotic model and does not contain any Asymptotic $\ell _p$ subspaces. Freeman et al., Trans. AMS. 370 (2018), 6933–6953 have shown that whenever a Banach space not containing $\ell _1$ , in particular a reflexive Banach space, admits $c_0$ as a unique asymptotic model, then it is Asymptotic $c_0$ . These results provide a complete answer to a problem posed by Halbeisen and Odell [Isr. J. Math. 139 (2004), 253–291] and also complete a line of inquiry of the relation between specific asymptotic structures in Banach spaces, initiated in a previous paper by the first and fourth authors. For the definition of $\mathfrak {X}^{(p)}_{\text {awi}}$ , we use saturation with asymptotically weakly incomparable constraints, a new method for defining a norm that remains small on a well-founded tree of vectors which penetrates any infinite dimensional closed subspace.

We prove that the class of reflexive asymptotic-$c_{0}$ Banach spaces is coarsely rigid, meaning that if a Banach space $X$ coarsely embeds into a reflexive asymptotic-$c_{0}$ space $Y$, then $X$ is also reflexive and asymptotic-$c_{0}$. In order to achieve this result, we provide a purely metric characterization of this class of Banach spaces. This metric characterization takes the form of a concentration inequality for Lipschitz maps on the Hamming graphs, which is rigid under coarse embeddings. Using an example of a quasi-reflexive asymptotic-$c_{0}$ space, we show that this concentration inequality is not equivalent to the non-equi-coarse embeddability of the Hamming graphs.

We construct a weak Hilbert space that is a twisted Hilbert space.

The purpose of this article is to generalize some known characterizations of Banach space properties in terms of graph preclusion. In particular, it is shown that superreflexivity can be characterized by the non-equi-bi-Lipschitz embeddability of any family of bundle graphs generated by a non-trivial finitely branching bundle graph. It is likewise shown that asymptotic uniform convexifiability can be characterized within the class of reflexive Banach spaces with an unconditional asymptotic structure by the non-equi-bi-Lipschitz embeddability of any family of bundle graphs generated by a non-trivial $\aleph _{0}$-branching bundle graph. For the specific case of $L_{1}$, it is shown that every countably branching bundle graph bi-Lipschitzly embeds into $L_{1}$ with distortion no worse than $2$.

Answering a question of Füredi and Loeb [On the best constant for the Besicovitch covering theorem. Proc. Amer. Math. Soc.121(4) (1994), 1063–1073], we show that the maximum number of pairwise intersecting homothets of a $d$-dimensional centrally symmetric convex body $K$, none of which contains the center of another in its interior, is at most $O(3^{d}d\log d)$. If $K$ is not necessarily centrally symmetric and the role of its center is played by its centroid, then the above bound can be replaced by $O(3^{d}\binom{2d}{d}d\log d)$. We establish analogous results for the case where the center is defined as an arbitrary point in the interior of $K$. We also show that, in the latter case, one can always find families of at least $\unicode[STIX]{x1D6FA}((2/\sqrt{3})^{d})$ translates of $K$ with the above property.

We provide new quantitative versions of Helly’s theorem. For example, we show that for every family $\{P_{i}:i\in I\}$ of closed half-spaces in $\mathbb{R}^{n}$ such that $P=\bigcap _{i\in I}P_{i}$ has positive volume, there exist $s\leqslant \unicode[STIX]{x1D6FC}n$ and $i_{1},\ldots ,i_{s}\in I$ such that

$$\begin{eqnarray}\operatorname{vol}_{n}(P_{i_{1}}\cap \cdots \cap P_{i_{s}})\leqslant (Cn)^{n}\operatorname{vol}_{n}(P),\end{eqnarray}$$

$\unicode[STIX]{x1D6FC},C>0$

Based on a construction method introduced by Bourgain and Delbaen, we give a general definition of a Bourgain–Delbaen space and prove that every infinite-dimensional separable ${\mathcal{L}}_{\infty }$-space is isomorphic to such a space. Furthermore, we provide an example of a ${\mathcal{L}}_{\infty }$ and asymptotic $c_{0}$ space not containing $c_{0}$.