A product of three projections

Let X and Y be two closed subspaces of a Hilbert space. If we send a point back and forth between them by orthogonal projections, the iterates converge to the projection of the point onto the intersection of X and Y by a theorem of von Neumann. Any sequence of orthoprojections of a point in a Hilbert space on a finite family of closed subspaces converges weakly, according to Amemiya and Ando. The problem of norm convergence was open for a long time. Recently Adam Paszkiewicz constructed five subspaces of an infinite dimensional Hilbert space and a sequence of projections on them which does not converge in norm. We construct three such subspaces, resolving the problem fully. As a corollary we observe that the Lipschitz constant of certain Whitney-type extension does in general depend on the dimension of the underlying space.