Geometry of the closed unit ball of the space of bilinear forms on $\ell_{\infty}^{2}$

Abstract

We obtain all extreme and exposed points of the closed unit ball of the space of bilinear forms $T:\ell_{\infty}^{2}\times\ell_{\infty}^{2}\rightarrow \mathbb{R}.$ We also show that any (norm one) bilinear form $T:\ell_{\infty }^{2}\times\ell_{\infty}^{2}\rightarrow\mathbb{R}$ for which the optimal constant of the Littlewood's $4/3$ inequality is achieved is necessarily an extreme point. In the case of complex scalars we combine analytical and numerical evidences supporting that, at least for complex bilinear forms with real coefficients, the optimal constant of Littlewood's $4/3$ inequality seems to the the trivial, i.e., $1.$