Spectral-free methods in the theory of hereditarily indecomposable Banach spaces

We give new and simple proofs of some classical properties of hereditarily indecomposable Banach spaces, including the result by W. T. Gowers and B. Maurey that a hereditarily indecomposable Banach space cannot be isomorphic to a proper subspace of itself. These proofs do not make use of spectral theory and therefore, they work in real spaces as well as in complex spaces. We use our method to prove some new results. For example, we give a quantitative version of the latter result by Gowers and Maurey and deduce that Banach spaces that are isometric to all of their subspaces should have an unconditional basis with unconditional constant arbitrarily close to $1$. We also study the homotopy relation between into isomorphisms in hereditarily indecomposable spaces.