Lipschitz-free spaces and Bossard's reduction argument

Abstract

We set up a descriptive set-theoretic framework to study Lipschitz-free spaces and use the reduction argument of Bossard to prove several results. We prove two universality results: if a separable Banach space is isomorphically universal for the class of Lipschitz-free spaces over the countable complete discrete metric spaces then it is isomorphically universal for the class of separable Banach spaces, and if a complete separable metric space is Lipschitz universal for the same class of metric spaces then it is Lipschitz universal for all separable metric spaces. We also show that there exist countable complete discrete metric spaces whose Lipschitz-free spaces fail the bounded approximation property and are thus not isomorphic to any dual Banach space. Finally, we calculate the descriptive complexity of the classes of separable Banach spaces and separable Lipschitz-free spaces having the approximation property.