posted on 2025-05-11, 07:52authored byJ. M. Borwein, W. Z. Huang
We prove (something more general than) the result that a convex subset of a Banach space is closed if and only if every contraction of the space leaving the convex set invariant has a fixed point in that subset. This implies that a normed space is complete if and only if every contraction on the space has a fixed point. We also show that these results fail if "convex" is replaced by "Lipschitz-connected" or "starshaped".
First published in Proceedings of the American Mathematical Society in Vol. 87, No. 2, pp. 246-250, 1983, published by the American Mathematical Society.