No Arabic abstract
In a seminal paper Volumen und Oberflache (1903), Minkowski introduced the basic notion of mixed volumes and the corresponding inequalities that lie at the heart of convex geometry. The fundamental importance of characterizing the extremals of these inequalities was already emphasized by Minkowski himself, but has to date only been resolved in special cases. In this paper, we completely settle the extremals of Minkowskis quadratic inequality, confirming a conjecture of R. Schneider. Our proof is based on the representation of mixed volumes of arbitrary convex bodies as Dirichlet forms associated to certain highly degenerate elliptic operators. A key ingredient of the proof is a quantitative rigidity property associated to these operators.
We prove that on an arbitrary metric measure space a countable collection of test plans is sufficient to recover all $rm BV$ functions and their total variation measures. In the setting of non-branching ${sf CD}(K,N)$ spaces (with finite reference measure), we can additionally require these test plans to be concentrated on geodesics.
Based on a recent work of Mancini-Thizy [28], we obtain the nonexistence of extremals for an inequality of Adimurthi-Druet [1] on a closed Riemann surface $(Sigma,g)$. Precisely, if $lambda_1(Sigma)$ is the first eigenvalue of the Laplace-Beltrami operator with respect to the zero mean value condition, then there exists a positive real number $alpha^ast<lambda_1(Sigma)$ such that for all $alphain (alpha^ast,lambda_1(Sigma))$, the supremum $$sup_{uin W^{1,2}(Sigma,g),,int_Sigma udv_g=0,,| abla_gu|_2leq 1}int_Sigma exp(4pi u^2(1+alpha|u|_2^2))dv_g$$ can not be attained by any $uin W^{1,2}(Sigma,g)$ with $int_Sigma udv_g=0$ and $| abla_gu|_2leq 1$, where $W^{1,2}(Sigma,g)$ denotes the usual Sobolev space and $|cdot|_2=(int_Sigma|cdot|^2dv_g)^{1/2}$ denotes the $L^2(Sigma,g)$-norm. This complements our earlier result in [39].
We prove the differentiability of Lipschitz maps X-->V, where X is a complete metric measure space satisfying a doubling condition and a Poincare inequality, and V is a Banach space with the Radon Nikodym Property (RNP). The proof depends on a new characterization of the differentiable structure on such metric measure spaces, in terms of directional derivatives in the direction of tangent vectors to suitable rectifiable curves.
At the heart of convex geometry lies the observation that the volume of convex bodies behaves as a polynomial. Many geometric inequalities may be expressed in terms of the coefficients of this polynomial, called mixed volumes. Among the deepest results of this theory is the Alexandrov-Fenchel inequality, which subsumes many known inequalities as special cases. The aim of this note is to give new proofs of the Alexandrov-Fenchel inequality and of its matrix counterpart, Alexandrovs inequality for mixed discriminants, that appear conceptually and technically simpler than earlier proofs and clarify the underlying structure. Our main observation is that these inequalities can be reduced by the spectral theorem to certain trivial `Bochner formulas.
We prove that sub-Riemannian manifolds are infinitesimally Hilbertian (i.e., the associated Sobolev space is Hilbert) when equipped with an arbitrary Radon measure. The result follows from an embedding of metric derivations into the space of square-integrable sections of the horizontal bundle, which we obtain on all weighted sub-Finsler manifolds. As an intermediate tool, of independent interest, we show that any sub-Finsler distance can be monotonically approximated from below by Finsler ones. All the results are obtained in the general setting of possibly rank-varying structures.