Strong Ulam Stability Characterizes Amenability

A countable discrete group is amenable if and only if it is strongly Ulam stable: every sufficiently accurate unitary almost representation, on any complex Hilbert space, is uniformly close in operator norm to a genuine representation on the same space. We prove the converse to Kazhdan's amenable stability theorem, answering the question of Burger, Ozawa, and Thom. The inclusion of infinite-dimensional Hilbert spaces is essential.