Let A , A be two regular commutative unital Banach algebras such that A is integral over A . In 2003, Dawson and Feinstein showed that the topological stable rank A whenever A . In this note, we investigate whether we will have A in general. For instance, when A is a commutative unital A -algebra, we show that A , and the equality holds at least when the integral extension is separable. In general, A and A have the same Bass stable ranks A .

We introduce the Jordan product associated with the second-order cone K into the real Hilbert space H, and then define a one-parametric class of complementarity functions t on H H with the parameter t[0, 2). We show that the squared norm of t with t(0, 2) is a continuously F (rchet)-differentiable merit function. By this, the second-order cone complementarity problem (SOCCP) in H can be converted into an unconstrained smooth minimization problem involving this class of merit functions, and furthermore, under the monotonicity assumption, every stationary point of this minimization problem is shown to be a solution of the SOCCP.

Let X be a compact Hausdorff space and C(X) the space of continuous functions defined on X. There are three versions of the Banach-Stone theorem. They assert that the Banach space geometry, the ring structure, and the lattice structure of C(X) determine the topological structure of X, respectively. In particular, the lattice version states that every disjointness preserving linear bijection T from C(X) onto C(Y) is a weighted composition operator Tf = h . f which provides a homeomorphism from Y onto X. In this note, we manage to use basically algebraic arguments to give this lattice version a short new proof. In this way, all three versions of the Banach-Stone theorem are unified in an algebraic framework such that different isomorphisms preserve different ideal structures of C(X).

In this paper, we introduce a broad class of nonlinear mappings in a Hilbert space which covers nonexpansive mappings, nonspreading mappings, hybrid mappings and contractive mappings. Then we prove fixed point theorems for the class of such mappings. Using these results, we prove well-known and new fixed point theorems in a Hilbert space.

We show that a compact operator A is a multiple of a positive semi-definite operator if and only if (A B) W (A) W (B), for all (rank one) operators B. An example of a normal operator is given to show that the equivalence conditions may fail in general. We then obtain conditions to identify other classes of operators A so that equivalence conditions hold.