Abstract. The cosine of the Friedrichs angle between two subspaces is generalized to a parameter associated with several closed subspaces of a Hilbert space. This parameter is employed to analyze the rate of convergence in the von Neumann-Halperin method of cyclic alternating projections. General dichotomy theorems are proved, in the Hilbert or Banach space situation, providing conditions under which the alternative QUC/ASC (quick uniform convergence versus arbitrarily slow convergence) holds. Several meanings for ASC are proposed. §1. IntroductionThroughout the paper H is a complex Hilbert space. For a closed linear subspace S of H we denote by S ⊥ its orthogonal complement in H, and by P S the orthogonal projection of H onto S. In this paper N denotes a fixed positive integer greater than or equal to 2.1A. The method of alternating projections. It was proved by J. von Neumann [27, p. 475] that for two closed subspaces M 1 and M 2 of H with intersection M = M 1 ∩ M 2 , the following convergence result holds:; then von Neumann's result says that the iterates T n of T are strongly convergent to T ∞ = P M . The method of constructing the iterates of T by alternately projecting onto one subspace and then onto the other is called the method of alternating projections. This algorithm, and its variations, occur in several fields, pure or applied. We refer to [10, Chapter 9] as a source for more information.A generalization of von Neumann's result to N closed subspacesIn the present paper, the algorithm provided by Halperin's result will be called the method of cyclic alternating projections.A Banach space extension of Halperin's result was proved by Bruck and Reich [9]: if X is a uniformly convex Banach space and P j , 1 ≤ j ≤ N , are N norm one projections in B(X), then the iterates of T = P N . . . P 2 P 1 are strongly convergent. The strong limit T ∞ is a projection of norm one onto the intersection of the ranges of P j . The same result is valid [3] if X is uniformly smooth and each projection P j is of norm one. It is also 2010 Mathematics Subject Classification. Primary 47A05, 47A10, 41A35.