License or copyright restrictions may apply to redistribution; see http://www.ams.org/journal-terms-of-use 102 DETELIN DOSEV, WILLIAM B. JOHNSON, AND GIDEON SCHECHTMAN in [4] a complete classification of the commutators on 1 , which, as one may expect, is the same as the classification of the commutators on 2 . A common feature of all the spaces X = p , 1 ≤ p < ∞ and X = c 0 is that the ideal of compact operators K(X ) on X is the largest nontrivial ideal in L(X ). The situation for X = ∞ is different. Recall that an operator T : X → Y is strictly singular provided the restriction of T to any infinite-dimensional subspace of X is not an isomorphism. On p , 1 ≤ p < ∞, and on c o , every strictly singular operator is compact, but on L( ∞ ), the ideal of strictly singular operators contains noncompact operators (and, incidentally, agrees with the ideal of weakly compact operators). In L( ∞ ), the ideal of strictly singular operators is the largest ideal, and it was proved in [5] that all operators on ∞ that are not commutators have the form λI + S, where λ = 0 and S is strictly singular.The classification of the commutators on p , 1 ≤ p ≤ ∞, and on c 0 , as well as partial results on other spaces, suggest the following:Licensed to Univ of Georgia. Prepared on Mon Jul 6 22:15:33 EDT 2015 for download from IP 128.192.Proof. As we already mentioned, we only need to consider the case 1 ≤ p < 2, and the case 2 < p < ∞ will follow by a duality argument.If T is a commutator, from the remarks we made in the introduction it follows that T − λI cannot be in M for any λ = 0. For proving the other direction we have to consider two cases:Case I. If T ∈ M (λ = 0), we first apply Theorem 1.3 to obtain a complemented subspace X ⊂ L p such that T |X is a compact operator and then apply [4, Corollary 12], which gives us the desired result.Case II. If T − λI / ∈ M for any λ ∈ C, we are in position to apply Theorem 1.2, which combined with Theorem 1.1 implies that T is a commutator.The rest of this paper is devoted to the proofs of Theorems 1.2 and 1.3. We consider the case L 1 separately since some of the ideas and methods used in this case are quite different from those used for the case L p , 1 < p < ∞.
Notation and basic resultsThroughout this manuscript, if X is a Banach space and X ⊆ X is complemented, by P X we denote a projection from X onto X. For any two subspaces (possibly not closed) X and Y of a Banach space Z letA well-known consequence of the open mapping theorem is that for any two closed subspaces X and Y of Z, if X ∩ Y = {0}, then X + Y is a closed subspace of Z if and only if d(X, Y ) > 0. Note also that 2d(X, Y ) ≥ d(Y, X) ≥ 1/2d(X, Y ); thus d(X, Y ) and d(Y, X) are equivalent up to a constant factor of 2. The following proposition was proved in [5] and will allow us later to consider only isomorphisms instead of arbitrary operators on L p . Proposition 2.1 ([5, Proposition 2.1]). Let X be a Banach space and T ∈ L(X ) be such that there exists a subspace Y ⊂ X for which T is an isomorphism on Y and d(Y, T Y ) > 0. ...