We verify a long-standing conjecture on the membership of univalent harmonic mappings in the Hardy space, whenever the functions have a “nice” analytic part. We also produce a coefficient estimate for these functions, which is in a sense best possible. The problem is then explored in a new direction, without the additional hypothesis. Interestingly, our ideas extend to certain classes of locally univalent harmonic mappings. Finally, we prove a Baernstein-type extremal result for the function $\log (h'+cg')$, when $f=h+\overline {g}$ is a close-to-convex harmonic function, and c is a constant. This leads to a sharp coefficient inequality for these functions.

Some better estimates for the difference between the integral mean of a function and its mean over a subinterval are established. Various applications for special means and probability density functions are also given.

We prove that if f is an integrable function on the unit sphere S in ℝn, g is its symmetric decreasing rearrangement and u, v are the harmonic extensions of f, g in the unit ball , then v has larger convex integral means over each sphere rS, 0 < r < 1, than u has. We also prove that if u is harmonic in with |u| < 1 and u(0) = 0, then the convex integral mean of u on each sphere rS is dominated by that of U, which is the harmonic function with boundary values 1 on the right hemisphere and −1 on the left one.

The norm of a function f in the Hardy space Hp(𝔻) is by definition the limit of as r→1. We show that grows at most like o(1/log r) as r→1.

For 0 < p < ∞, we let pp−1 denote the space of those functions f that are analytic in the unit disc Δ = {z ∈ C: |z| < 1} and satisfy ∫Δ(1 – |z|)p−1|f′(z)|pdx dy < ∞ The spaces pp−1 are closely related to Hardy spaces. We have, p−1p ⊂ Hp, if 0 < p ≦ 2, and Hp ⊂ pp−1, if 2 ≦ p < ∞. In this paper we obtain a number of results about the Taylor coefficients of pp-1 -functions and sharp estimates on the growth of the integral means and the radial growth of these functions as well as information on their zero sets.

2000 Mathematics subject classification: primary 30D35, 30D55, 46E15.