A characterisation of inner product spaces by the maximal circumradius of spheres

Sebastian Scholtes

Published 2012-02-02Version 1

We give a new characterisation of inner product spaces amongst normed vector spaces in terms of the maximal cirumradius of spheres. It turns out that a normed vector space $(X,\norm{\cdot})$ with $\dim X\geq 2$ is an inner product space if and only if all spheres are not degenerate, i.e. the maximal circumradius of points on the sphere equals the radius of the sphere.