EN
We investigate the relationships between strongly extreme, complex extreme, and complex locally uniformly rotund points of the unit ball of a symmetric function space or a symmetric sequence space E, and of the unit ball of the space E(ℳ,τ) of τ-measurable operators associated to a semifinite von Neumann algebra (ℳ,τ) or of the unit ball in the unitary matrix space $C_{E}$. We prove that strongly extreme, complex extreme, and complex locally uniformly rotund points x of the unit ball of the symmetric space E(ℳ,τ) inherit these properties from their singular value function μ(x) in the unit ball of E with additional necessary requirements on x in the case of complex extreme points. We also obtain the full converse statements for the von Neumann algebra ℳ with a faithful, normal, σ-finite trace τ as well as for the unitary matrix space $C_{E}$. Consequently, corresponding results on the global properties such as midpoint local uniform rotundity, complex rotundity and complex local uniform rotundity follow.