We answer in a probabilistic setting two questions raised by Stokolos in a private communication. Precisely, given a sequence of random variables $\left\{X_k : k \geq 1\right\}$ uniformly distributed in $(0,1)$ and independent, we consider the following random sets of directions

\begin{equation*}\Omega_{\text{rand},\text{lin}} := \left\{ \frac{\pi X_k}{k}: k \geq 1\right\}\end{equation*}

\begin{equation*}\Omega_{\text{rand},\text{lac}} := \left\{\frac{\pi X_k}{2^k} : k\geq 1 \right\}.\end{equation*}

We prove that almost surely the directional maximal operators associated to those sets of directions are not bounded on $L^p({\mathbb{R}}^2)$ for any $1 \lt p \lt \infty$.

This paper relies on nested postulates of separate, linear and arc-continuity of functions to define analogous properties for sets that are weaker than the requirement that the set be open or closed. This allows three novel characterisations of open or closed sets under convexity or separate convexity postulates: the first pertains to separately convex sets, the second to convex sets and the third to arbitrary subsets of a finite-dimensional Euclidean space. By relying on these constructions, we also obtain new results on the relationship between separate and joint continuity of separately quasiconcave, or separately quasiconvex functions. We present examples to show that the sufficient conditions we offer cannot be dispensed with.

We obtain a criterion for an analytic subset of a Euclidean space to contain points of differentiability of a typical Lipschitz function: namely, that it cannot be covered by countably many sets, each of which is closed and purely unrectifiable (has a zero-length intersection with every $C^1$ curve). Surprisingly, we establish that any set failing this criterion witnesses the opposite extreme of typical behaviour: in any such coverable set, a typical Lipschitz function is everywhere severely non-differentiable.

We discuss an alternative approach to Fréchet derivatives on Banach spaces inspired by a characterisation of derivatives due to Carathéodory. The approach allows many questions of differentiability to be reduced to questions of continuity. We demonstrate how that simplifies the theory of differentiation, including the rules of differentiation and the Schwarz lemma on the symmetry of second-order derivatives. We also provide a short proof of the differentiable dependence of fixed points in the Banach fixed point theorem.

By an influential theorem of Boman, a function $f$ on an open set $U$ in $\mathbb{R}^{d}$ is smooth (${\mathcal{C}}^{\infty }$) if and only if it is arc-smooth, that is, $f\,\circ \,c$ is smooth for every smooth curve $c:\mathbb{R}\rightarrow U$. In this paper we investigate the validity of this result on closed sets. Our main focus is on sets which are the closure of their interior, so-called fat sets. We obtain an analogue of Boman’s theorem on fat closed sets with Hölder boundary and on fat closed subanalytic sets with the property that every boundary point has a basis of neighborhoods each of which intersects the interior in a connected set. If $X\subseteq \mathbb{R}^{d}$ is any such set and $f:X\rightarrow \mathbb{R}$ is arc-smooth, then $f$ extends to a smooth function defined on $\mathbb{R}^{d}$. We also get a version of the Bochnak–Siciak theorem on all closed fat subanalytic sets and all closed sets with Hölder boundary: if $f:X\rightarrow \mathbb{R}$ is the restriction of a smooth function on $\mathbb{R}^{d}$ which is real analytic along all real analytic curves in $X$, then $f$ extends to a holomorphic function on a neighborhood of $X$ in $\mathbb{C}^{d}$. Similar results hold for non-quasianalytic Denjoy–Carleman classes (of Roumieu type). We will also discuss sharpness and applications of these results.

We study approximately differentiable functions on metric measure spaces admitting a Cheeger differentiable structure. The main result is a Whitney-type characterization of approximately differentiable functions in this setting. As an application, we prove a Stepanov-type theorem and consider approximate differentiability of Sobolev, $BV$, and maximal functions.

We prove that if $f\,:\,{{\mathbb{R}}^{N}}\,\to \,\overline{\mathbb{R}}$ is quasiconvex and $U\,\subset \,{{\mathbb{R}}^{N}}$ is open in the density topology, then $\underset{U}{\mathop{\sup }}\,f=\text{ess}\,\underset{U}{\mathop{\sup }}\,f$, while ${{\inf }_{U}}\,f\,=\,\text{ess}\,{{\inf }_{U}}\,f$ if and only if the equality holds when $U\,\subset \,{{\mathbb{R}}^{N}}$. The first (second) property is typical of $\text{lsc}\,\text{(usc)}$ functions, and, even when $U$ is an ordinary open subset, there seems to be no record that they both hold for all quasiconvex functions.

This property ensures that the pointwise extrema of $f$ on any nonempty density open subset can be arbitrarily closely approximated by values of $f$ achieved on “large” subsets, which may be of relevance in a variety of situations. To support this claim, we use it to characterize the common points of continuity, or approximate continuity, of two quasiconvex functions that coincide away from a set of measure zero.

We study classes of mappings between finite and infinite dimensional Banach spaces that are monotone and mappings which are differences of monotone mappings ($\text{DM}$). We prove a Radó–Reichelderfer estimate for monotone mappings in finite dimensional spaces that remains valid for $\text{DM}$ mappings. This provides an alternative proof of the Fréchet differentiability a.e. of $\text{DM}$ mappings. We establish a Morrey-type estimate for the distributional derivative of monotone mappings. We prove that a locally $\text{DM}$ mapping between finite dimensional spaces is also globally $\text{DM}$. We introduce and study a new class of the so-called $\text{UDM}$ mappings between Banach spaces, which generalizes the concept of curves of finite variation.

We study the range of the gradients of a ${{C}^{1,\alpha }}$ -smooth bump function defined on a Banach space. We find that this set must satisfy two geometrical conditions: It can not be too flat and it satisfies a strong compactness condition with respect to an appropriate distance. These notions are defined precisely below. With these results we illustrate the differences with the case of ${{C}^{1}}$-smooth bump functions. Finally, we give a sufficient condition on a subset of ${{X}^{*}}$ so that it is the set of the gradients of a ${{C}^{1,1}}$-smooth bump function. In particular, if $X$ is an infinite dimensional Banach space with a ${{C}^{1,1}}$-smooth bump function, then any convex open bounded subset of ${{X}^{*}}$ containing 0 is the set of the gradients of a ${{C}^{1,1}}$-smooth bump function.

Differentiability properties of optimal value functions associated with perturbed optimization problems require strong assumptions. We consider such a set of assumptions which does not use compactness hypothesis but which involves a kind of coherence property. Moreover, a strict differentiability property is obtained by using techniques of Ekeland and Lebourg and a result of Preiss. Such a strengthening is required in order to obtain genericity results.

Recently, F. H. Clarke and Y. Ledyaev established a multidirectional mean value theorem applicable to lower semi-continuous functions on Hilbert spaces, a result which turns out to be useful in many applications. We develop a variant of the result applicable to locally Lipschitz functions on certain Banach spaces, namely those that admit a C1-Lipschitz continuous bump function.

Let ƒ:H → (—∞,∞] be lower semicontinuous, where H is a real Hilbert space. An approach based upon nonsmooth analysis and optimization is used in order to characterize monotonicity of ƒ with respect to a cone, as well as Lipschitz behavior and constancy. The results, which involve hypotheses on the proximal subgradient ∂ πƒ, specialize on the real line to yield classical characterizations of these properties in terms of the Dini derivate. They also give new extensions of these results to the multidimensional case. A new proof of a known characterization of convexity in terms of proximal subgradient monotonicity is also given.

We define an iterative interpolation process for data spread over a closed discrete subgroup of the Euclidean space. We describe the main algebraic properties of this process. This interpolation process, under very weak assumptions, is always convergent in the sense of Schwartz distributions. We find also a convenient necessary and sufficient condition for continuity of each interpolation function of a given iterative interpolation process.

The proximal subgradient formula is a refinement due to Rockafellar of Clarke's fundamental proximal normal formula. It expresses Clarke's generalized gradient of a lower semicontinuous function in terms of analytically simpler proximal subgradients. We use the infinite-dimensional proximal normal formula recently given by Borwein and Strojwas to derive a new version of the proximal subgradient formula in a reflexive Banach space X with Frechet differentiable and locally uniformly convex norm. Our result improves on the one given by Borwein and Strojwas by referring only to the given norm on X.