Invariant means on Abelian groups capture complementability of Banach spaces in their second duals

Abstract

Let $X$ be a Banach space. Then $X$ is complemented in the bidual $X^{**}$ if and only if there exists an invariant mean $\ell_\infty(G, X)\to X$ with respect to a free Abelian group $G$ of rank equal to the cardinality of $X^{**}$, and this happens if and only if there exists an invariant mean with respect to the additive group of $X^{**}$. This improves upon previous results due to Bustos Domecq =and the second-named author, where certain idempotent semigroups of cardinality equal to the cardinality of $X^{**}$ were considered, and answers a question of J.M.F. Castillo (private communication). En route to the proof of the main result, we endow the family of all finite-dimensional subspaces of an infinite-dimensional vector space with a structure of a free commutative monoid with the property that the product of two subspaces contains the respective subspaces, which is possibly of interest in itself.