Thursday, January 2, 2020

real analysis - Characterizing discontinuous derivatives


Apparently the set of discontinuity of derivatives is weird in its own sense. Following are the examples that I know so far:


1. g(x)={x2sin(1x)x(0,1]0x=0

g is discontinuous at x=0.


2. The Volterra function defined on the ternary Cantor set is differentiable everywhere but the derivative is discontinuous on the whole of Cantor set ,that is on a nowhere dense set of measure zero.


3. The Volterra function defined on the Fat-Cantor set is differentiable everywhere but the derivative is discontinuous on the whole of Fat-Cantor set ,that is on a set of positive measure, but not full measure.


4. I am yet to find a derivative which is discontinuous on a set of full measure.


Some good discussion about this can be found here and here.


Questions:


1.What are some examples of functions whose derivative is discontinuous on a dense set of zero measure , say on the rationals?



2.What are some examples of functions whose derivative is discontinuous on a dense set of positive measure , say on the irrationals?


Update: One can find a function which is differentiable everywhere but whose derivative is discontinuous on a dense set of zero measure here.


Answer



There is no everywhere differentiable function f on [0,1] such that f is discontinuous at each irrational there. That's because f, being the everywhere pointwise limit of continuous functions, is continuous on a dense Gδ subset of [0,1]. This is a result of Baire. Thus f can't be continuous only on a subset of the rationals, a set of the first category.


But there is a differentiable function whose derivative is discontinuous on a set of full measure.


Proof: For every Cantor set K[0,1] there is a "Volterra function" f relative to K, which for the purpose at hand means a differentiable function f on [0,1] such that i)|f|1 on [0,1], ii) |f|1 on [0,1], iii) f is continuous on [0,1]K, iv) f is discontinuous at each point of K.


Now we can choose disjoint Cantor sets Kn[0,1] such that nm(Kn)=1. For each n we choose a Volterra function fn as above. Then define


F=n=1fn2n.


F is well defined by this series, and is differentiable on [0,1]. That's because each summand above is differentiable there, and the sum of derivatives converges uniformly on [0,1]. So we have


F(x)=n=1fn(x)2n for each x[0,1].



Let x0Kn. Then x0 is in some Kn0. We can write


F(x)=fn0(x)2n0+nn0fn(x)2n.


Now the sum on the right is continuous at x0, being the uniform limit of functions continuous at x0. But fn0/2n0 is not continuous at x0. This shows F is not continuous at x0. Since x0 was an aribtrary point in Kn, F is discontinuous on a set of full measure as desired.


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