Overview

In the three and a half years since the first edition to these notes was written there has been progress on a number of relevant topics. D. Preiss answered in the affirmative the decades old question of whether a Banach space with an equivalent Gateaux differentiable norm is a weak Asplund space, while R. Haydon constructed some very ingenious examples which show, among other things, that the converse to Preiss' theorem is false. S. Simons produced a startlingly simple proof of Rockafellar's maximal monotonicity theorem for subdifferentials of convex functions. G. Godefroy, R. Deville and V. Zizler proved an exciting new version ofthe Borwein-Preiss smooth variational prin- ciple. Other new contributions to the area have come from J. Borwein, S. Fitzpatrick, P. Kenderov, 1. Namioka, N. Ribarska, A. and M. E. Verona and the author. Some ofthe new material and substantial portions ofthe first edition were used in a one-quarter graduate course at the University of Washington in 1991 (leading to a number of corrections and improvements) and some of the new theorems were presented in the Rainwater Seminar. An obvious improvement is due to the fact that I learned to use '!EX. The task of converting the original MacWrite text to '!EXwas performed by Ms. Mary Sheetz, to whom I am extremely grateful.