We show that there exists a separable reflexive Banach space into which every separable uniformly convex Banach space isomorphically embeds. This solves a problem of J. Bourgain. We also give intrinsic characterizations of separable reflexive Banach spaces which embed into a reflexive space with a block q-Hilbertian and/or a block p-Besselian finite dimensional decomposition.

We give a characterization of uniformly convex Banach spaces in terms of a uniform version of the Kadec-Klee property. As an application we prove that if (xn) is a bounded sequence in a uniformly convex Banach space X which is ε-separated for some 0 < ε ≤ 2, then for all norm one vectors x ∈ X there exists a subsequence (xn j) of (xn) such that inf j =k x − (xn j − xn k) ≥ 1 + δ X (2 3 ε), wher...

The notion of a bead metric space is defined as a nice generalization of the uniformly convex normed space such as $CAT(0)$ space, where the curvature is bounded from above by zero. In fact, the bead spaces themselves can be considered in particular as natural extensions of convex sets in uniformly convex spaces and normed bead spaces are identical with uniformly convex spaces. In this paper, w...