We prove that the Fridman invariant defined using the Carathéodory pseudodistance does not always go to 1 near strongly Levi pseudoconvex boundary points and it always goes to 0 near nonpseudoconvex boundary points. We also discuss whether Fridman invariants can be extended continuously to some boundary points of domains constructed by deleting compact subsets from other domains.

Let f be analytic in the unit disk $\mathbb {D}=\{z\in \mathbb {C}:|z|<1 \}$ and let ${\mathcal S}$ be the subclass of normalised univalent functions with $f(0)=0$ and $f'(0)=1$ , given by $f(z)=z+\sum _{n=2}^{\infty }a_n z^n$ . Let F be the inverse function of f, given by $F(\omega )=\omega +\sum _{n=2}^{\infty }A_n \omega ^n$ for $|\omega |\le r_0(f)$ . Denote by $ \mathcal {S}_p^{* }(\alpha )$ the subset of $ \mathcal {S}$ consisting of the spirallike functions of order $\alpha $ in $\mathbb {D}$ , that is, functions satisfying

$$\begin{align*}{\mathrm{Re}} \ \bigg\{e^{-i\gamma}\dfrac{zf'(z)}{f(z)}\bigg\}>\alpha\cos \gamma, \end{align*}$$

for $z\in \mathbb {D}$ , $0\le \alpha <1$ and $\gamma \in (-\pi /2,\pi /2)$ . We give sharp upper and lower bounds for both $ |a_3|-|a_2| $ and $ |A_3|-|A_2| $ when $f\in \mathcal {S}_p^{* }(\alpha )$ , thus solving an open problem and presenting some new inequalities for coefficient differences.

We prove that for a Banach algebra A having a bounded $\mathcal {Z}(A)$ -approximate identity and for every $\mathbf {[IN]}$ group G with a weight w which is either constant on conjugacy classes or satisfies $w \geq 1$ , $\mathcal {Z}(L^{1}_{w}(G) \otimes ^{\gamma } A) \cong \mathcal {Z}(L^{1}_{w}(G)) \otimes ^{\gamma } \mathcal {Z}(A)$ . As an application, we discuss the conditions under which $\mathcal {Z}(L^{1}_{\omega }(G,A))$ enjoys certain Banach algebraic properties, such as weak amenability or semisimplicity.

Let X be a real Banach space. The rectangular constant $\mu (X)$ and some generalisations of it, $\mu _p(X)$ for $p \geq 1$ , were introduced by Gastinel and Joly around half a century ago. In this paper we make precise some characterisations of inner product spaces by using $\mu _p(X)$ , correcting some statements appearing in the literature, and extend to $\mu _p(X)$ some characterisations of uniformly nonsquare spaces, known only for $\mu (X)$ . We also give a characterisation of two-dimensional spaces with hexagonal norms. Finally, we indicate some new upper estimates concerning $\mu (l_p)$ and $\mu _p(l_p)$ .

We establish a family of q-supercongruences modulo the cube of a cyclotomic polynomial for truncated basic hypergeometric series. This confirms a weaker form of a conjecture of the present authors. Our proof employs a very-well-poised Karlsson–Minton type summation due to Gasper, together with the ‘creative microscoping’ method introduced by the first author in recent joint work with Zudilin.

Generalising the concept of injectivity, we study the notion of $\varphi $ -injectivity for dual Banach algebras. It provides a framework for studying $\varphi $ -amenability of enveloping dual Banach algebras.

Let A be a Banach algebra and let X be a Banach A-bimodule. We consider the Banach algebra ${A\oplus _1 X}$ , where A is a commutative Banach algebra. We investigate the Bochner–Schoenberg–Eberlein (BSE) property and the BSE module property on $A\oplus _1 X$ . We show that the module extension Banach algebra $A\oplus _1 X$ is a BSE Banach algebra if and only if A is a BSE Banach algebra and $X=\{0\}$ . Furthermore, we consider $A\oplus _1 X$ as a Banach $A\oplus _1 X$ -module and characterise the BSE module property on $A\oplus _1 X$ . We show that $A\oplus _1 X$ is a BSE Banach $A\oplus _1 X$ -module if and only if A and X are BSE Banach A-modules.

In this note, we show that given a closed connected oriented $3$ -manifold M, there exists a knot K in M such that the manifold $M'$ obtained from M by performing an integer surgery admits an open book decomposition which embeds into the trivial open book of the $5$ -sphere $S^5.$

We expand upon work from many hands on the decomposition of nuclear maps. Such maps can be characterised by their ability to be approximately written as the composition of maps to and from matrices. Under certain conditions (such as quasidiagonality), we can find a decomposition whose maps behave nicely, by preserving multiplication up to an arbitrary degree of accuracy and being constructed from order-zero maps (as in the definition of nuclear dimension). We investigate these conditions and relate them to a W*-analogue.

Let A and $\tilde A$ be unbounded linear operators on a Hilbert space. We consider the following problem. Let the spectrum of A lie in some horizontal strip. In which strip does the spectrum of $\tilde A$ lie, if A and $\tilde A$ are sufficiently ‘close’? We derive a sharp bound for the strip containing the spectrum of $\tilde A$ , assuming that $\tilde A-A$ is a bounded operator and A has a bounded Hermitian component. We also discuss applications of our results to regular matrix differential operators.

We prove that the restriction of a given orthogonal-complete metric space to the closure of the orbit induced by the origin point with respect to an orthogonal-preserving and orthogonal-continuous map is a complete metric space. Then we show that many existence results on fixed points in orthogonal-complete metric spaces can be proved by using the corresponding existence results in complete metric spaces.

Many bundle gerbes are either infinite-dimensional, or finite-dimensional but built using submersions that are far from being fibre bundles. Murray and Stevenson [‘A note on bundle gerbes and infinite-dimensionality’, J. Aust. Math. Soc.90(1) (2011), 81–92] proved that gerbes on simply-connected manifolds, built from finite-dimensional fibre bundles with connected fibres, always have a torsion $DD$ -class. I prove an analogous result for a wide class of gerbes built from principal bundles, relaxing the requirements on the fundamental group of the base and the connected components of the fibre, allowing both to be nontrivial. This has consequences for possible models for basic gerbes, the classification of crossed modules of finite-dimensional Lie groups, the coefficient Lie-2-algebras for higher gauge theory on principal 2-bundles and finite-dimensional twists of topological K-theory.

Let G be a locally compact group and let ${\mathcal {SUB}(G)}$ be the hyperspace of closed subgroups of G endowed with the Chabauty topology. The main purpose of this paper is to characterise the connectedness of the Chabauty space ${\mathcal {SUB}(G)}$ . More precisely, we show that if G is a connected pronilpotent group, then ${\mathcal {SUB}(G)}$ is connected if and only if G contains a closed subgroup topologically isomorphic to ${{\mathbb R}}$ .