Smoothness in Banach spaces. Selected problems

This is a short survey on some recent as well as classical results and open problems in smoothness and renormings of Banach spaces. Applications in general topology and nonlinear analysis are considered. A few new results and new proofs are included. An effort has been made that a young researcher may enjoy going through it without any special pre-requisites and get a feeling about this area of Banach space theory. Many open problems of different level of difficulty are discussed. For the reader convenience, an ample list of literature quotations is included