On the Number of Mather Measures of Lagrangian Systems

Abstract

In 1996, Ricardo Ricardo Mañé discovered that Mather measures are in fact the minimizers of a “universal” infinite dimensional linear programming problem. This fundamental result has many applications, of which one of the most important is to the estimates of the generic number of Mather measures. Mañé obtained the first estimation of that sort by using finite dimensional approximations. Recently, we were able, with Gonzalo Contreras, to use this method of finite dimensional approximation in order to solve a conjecture of John Mather concerning the generic number of Mather measures for families of Lagrangian systems. In the present paper we obtain finer results in that direction by applying directly some classical tools of convex analysis to the infinite dimensional problem. We use a notion of countably rectifiable sets of finite codimension in Banach (and Frechet) spaces which may deserve independent interest.