Geometric mean and triangles inscribed in a semicircle in Banach spaces

We consider the triangles with vertices x, −x and y where x,y are points on the unit sphere of a normed space. Using the geometric means of the variable lengths of the sides of these triangles, we define two geometric constants for Banach spaces. These constants are closely related to the modulus of convexity of the space under consideration, and they seem to represent a useful tool to estimate the exact values of the James and Jordan–von Neumann constants of some Banach spaces. © 2007 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved