Compact operators and the unit ball
Published:
One famous fact in functional analysis is that the closed unit ball $B_X$ of a normed space $X$ is compact if, and only if, the space $X$ is finite dimensional. As if paying homage to that, compact linear operators (operators that map bounded sets $A$ to relatively compact sets $T(A)$, where $\overline{T(A)}$ is compact), allude to both notions of compactness and finite-dimensionality.