An analyst’s traveling salesman theorem for sets of dimension larger than one

Abstract

In his 1990 Inventiones paper, P. Jones characterized subsets of rectifiable curves in the plane via a multiscale sum of $$\beta $$ -numbers. These $$\beta $$ -numbers are geometric quantities measuring how far a given set deviates from a best fitting line at each scale and location. Jones’ result is a quantitative way of saying that a curve is rectifiable if and only if it has a tangent at almost every point. Moreover, computing this square sum for a curve returns the length of the curve up to multiplicative constant. K. Okikiolu extended his result from subsets of the plane to subsets of Euclidean space. G. David and S. Semmes extended the discussion to include sets of (integer) dimension larger than one, under the assumption of Ahlfors regularity and using a variant of Jones’ $$\beta $$ -numbers. This variant has since been used by others to give structure theorems for rectifiable sets and to give upper bounds for the measure of a set. In this paper we give a version of P. Jones’ theorem for sets of arbitrary (integer) dimension lying in Euclidean space. Our main result is a lower bound for the d-dimensional Hausdorff measure of a set in terms of an analogous sum of $$\beta $$ -type numbers. We also show an upper bound of this type. The combination of these results gives a Jones theorem for higher dimensional sets. While there is no assumption of Ahlfors regularity, or of a measure on the underlying set, there is an assumption of a lower bound on the Hausdorff content. We adapt David and Semmes’ version of Jones’ $$\beta $$ -numbers by redefining them using a Choquet integral, allowing them to be defined for arbitrary sets (and not just sets of locally finite measure). A key tool in the proof is G. David and T. Toro’s parametrization of Reifenberg flat sets (with holes).