We study the complexities of isometry and isomorphism classes of separable Banach spaces in the Polish spaces of Banach spaces, recently introduced and investigated by the authors in [14]. We obtain sharp results concerning the most classical separable Banach spaces.

We prove that the infinite-dimensional separable Hilbert space is characterized as the unique separable infinite-dimensional Banach space whose isometry class is closed, and also as the unique separable infinite-dimensional Banach space whose isomorphism class is $F_\sigma $. For $p\in \left [1,2\right )\cup \left (2,\infty \right )$, we show that the isometry classes of $L_p[0,1]$ and $\ell _p$ are $G_\delta $-complete sets and $F_{\sigma \delta }$-complete sets, respectively. Then we show that the isometry class of $c_0$ is an $F_{\sigma \delta }$-complete set.

Additionally, we compute the complexities of many other natural classes of separable Banach spaces; for instance, the class of separable $\mathcal {L}_{p,\lambda +}$-spaces, for $p,\lambda \geq 1$, is shown to be a $G_\delta $-set, the class of superreflexive spaces is shown to be an $F_{\sigma \delta }$-set, and the class of spaces with local $\Pi $-basis structure is shown to be a $\boldsymbol {\Sigma }^0_6$-set. The paper is concluded with many open problems and suggestions for a future research.

We obtain an equivalent implicit characterization of Lp Banach spaces that is amenable to a logical treatment. Using that, we obtain an axiomatization for such spaces into a higher order logical system, the kind of which is used in proof mining, a research program that aims to obtain the hidden computational content of mathematical proofs using tools from mathematical logic. As an aside, we obtain a concrete way of formalizing Lp spaces in positive-bounded logic. The axiomatization is followed by a corresponding metatheorem in the style of proof mining. We illustrate its use with the derivation for this class of spaces of the standard modulus of uniform convexity.