Published online by Cambridge University Press: 14 November 2011
Lp -summands and Lp -projections in Banach spaces have been studied by E. Behrends, who showed that for a fixed value of p, l ≦ p ≦ ∞, p ≠ 2, any two Lp -projections on a given Banach space E commute. Here we introduce the notion of almost-Lp -projections, and we establish a result which generalises Behrends' theorem, while also simplifying its proof. Almost-Lp-projections are then applied to the study of small-bound isomorphisms of Bochner LP -spaces. It is shown that if the Banach space E satisfies a geometric condition which, in the finite-dimensional case, reduces to the absence of non-trivial Lp-summands, then for separable measure spaces, the existence of a small-bound isomorphism between Lp (λ1, E) and LP(λ2, E) implies that these Bochner spaces are, in fact, isometric.