Amenability of Lipschitz algebras

Abstract

In this article, we study the amenability of Banach algebras in general, and that of Lipschitz algebras in particular. After introducing an alternative definition of amenability, we extend a result of [5], thereby proving a new characterization of amenability for Banach algebras. This characterization relates the amenability of a Banach algebra A to the space of bounded homomorphisms from A into another Banach algebra B (Theorem 4). This result allows us to solve the problem of amenability for virtually all Lipschitz algebras (of complex or Banach algebra valued functions), a class of algebras which has been studied in [2], [4] and [5].