Orthogonality in normed spaces

Abstract

Motivated by the questions in the theory of Fredholm stability in Banach space and Kato's strictly singular operators we answer several natural questions concerning ``orthogonality'' in normed spaces and the properties of metric projections. What the reader will see below might have benn known long ago, but we did not find it in the literature. Some open (for us) questions are formulated at the end of Sections 7 and 9.