is the ball of radius centered at ), and denotes the d-dimensional Lebesgue measure.
The averages are jointly continuous in "x" and "r", therefore the maximal function "Mf", being the supremum over "r" > 0, is measurable. It is not obvious that "Mf" is finite almost everywhere. This is a corollary of the Hardy-Littlewood maximal inequality
Hardy-Littlewood maximal inequality
This theorem of G. H. Hardy and J. E. Littlewood states that is bounded as a sublinear operator from the "L""p" space
:
to itself. That is, if
:
then the maximal function "Mf" is weak "L"1 bounded and
:
More precisely, for all dimensions "d" ≥ 1 and 1 < "p" ≤ ∞, and all "f" ∈ "L"1(R"d"), there is a constant "Cd" > 0 such that for all "λ" > 0 , we have the "weak type"-(1,1) bound:
:
This is the Hardy-Littlewood maximal inequality.
With the Hardy-Littlewood maximal inequality in hand, the following "strong-type" estimate is an immediate consequence of the Marcinkiewicz interpolation theorem: there exists a constant "A""p,d" > 0 such that
:
Proof
While there are several proofs of this theorem, a common one is outlined as follows: For , (see Lp space for definition of ) the inequality is trivial (since the average of a function is no larger than its essential supremum). For 1 < "p" < ∞, one proves the weak bound using the Vitali covering lemma.
Applications
Some applications of the Hardy-Littlewood Maximal Inequality include proving the following results:
* Lebesgue differentiation theorem
* Rademacher differentiation theorem
* Fatou's theorem on nontangential convergence.
Discussion
It is still unknown what the smallest constants and are in the above inequalities. However, a result of Elias Stein about spherical maximal functions can be used to show that, for