The notion of Arens regularity of a bilinear form on a Banach space E
is extended to continuous m-linear forms, in such a way that the natur
al associated linear mappings, E --> L(Em-1) and (m - 1)-linear mappin
gs E x ... x E --> E', are all weakly compact. Among other application
s, polynomials whose first derivative is weakly compact are characteri
zed.