Barrelled spaces and dense vector subspaces

Abstract

This note presents a structure theorem for locally convex barrelled spaces. It is shown that, corresponding to any Hamel basis, there is a natural splitting of a barrelled space into a topological sum of two vector subspaces, one with its strongest locally convex topology. This yields a simple proof that a barrelled space has a dense infinite-codimensional vector subspace, provided that it does not have its strongest locally convex topology. Some further results and examples discuss the size of the codimension of a dense vector subspace.