Published online by Cambridge University Press: 09 April 2009
The concept of very weak local uniform rotundity (very WLUR) is introduced. It is shown that if a Banach space E is WLUR, very WLUR, or LUR then its dual E* is smooth, very smooth, or Fréchet differentiable, respectively, on a norm dense subset. This leads to examples of nonreflexive spaces which are Fréchet differentiable at every nonzero point of a (relatively) norm dense subset of the embedding of E** in the fourth dual. When E is reflexive, necessary and sufficient conditions for E and E* to be WLUR and LUR are given.
Subject classification (Amer. Math. Soc. (MOS) 1970): 46 B 99.