This book deals with the geometrical structure of finite dimensional
normed spaces, as the dimension grows to infinity. This is a part of
what came to be known as the Local Theory of Banach Spaces (this name
was derived from the fact that in its first stages, this theory dealt
mainly with relating the structure of infinite dimensional Banach spaces
to the structure of their lattice of finite dimensional subspaces). Our
purpose in this book is to introduce the reader to some of the results,
problems, and mainly methods developed in the Local Theory, in the last
few years. This by no means is a complete survey of this wide area. Some
of the main topics we do not discuss here are mentioned in the Notes and
Remarks section. Several books appeared recently or are going to appear
shortly, which cover much of the material not covered in this book.
Among these are Pisier's [Pis6] where factorization theorems related
to Grothendieck's theorem are extensively discussed, and
Tomczak-Jaegermann's [T-Jl] where operator ideals and distances
between finite dimensional normed spaces are studied in detail. Another
related book is Pietch's [Pie].