Norming and dense sets of extreme points of the unit ball in spaces of bounded Lipschitz functions

Abstract: On spaces of finite signed Borel measures on a metric space one has introduced the Fortet-Mourier and Dudley norms, by embedding the measures into the dual space of the Banach space of bounded Lipschitz functions, equipped with different -- but equivalent -- norms: the FM-norm and the BL-nor, respectively. The norm of such a measure is then obtained by maximising the value of the measure when applied by integration to extremal functions of the unit ball. We introduce suitable subsets of extremal functions in both cases, essentially by a construction by means of McShane's Lipschitz extension operator for Lipschitz functions on finite metric spaces, that are shown to be norming. As a consequence, we obtain that these sets are weak-star dense in the full set of extreme points of the unit ball. If the underlying metric space is connected, then we have found a larger set of extremal functions for the BL-norm, similar to such a set that was defined previously by J. Johnson for the FM-norm when the underlying space was compact. This set is then also weak-star dense in the extremal functions. This may open an avenue to obtaining computational approaches for the Dudley norm on signed Borel measures.