Strong and weak duality principles for fractal dimension in Euclidean space

Abstract

AbstractTricot [27] provided apparently dual representations of the Hausdorff and packing dimensions of any analytic subset of Euclidean d-space in terms of, respectively, the lower and upper pointwise dimension maps of the finite Borel measures on ℝd. In this paper we show that Tricot's two representations, while similar in appearance, are in fact not duals of each other, but rather the duals of two other ‘missing’ representations. The key to obtaining these missing representations lies in extended Frostman and antiFrostman lemmas, both of which we develop in this paper. This leads to the formulation of two distinct characterizations of dim (A) and Dim (A), one which we call the weak duality principle and the other the strong duality principle. In particular, the strong duality principle is concerned with the existence, for each analytic set A, of measures on A that are (almost) of the same exact dimension (Hausdorff or packing) as A. The connection with Rényi (or information) dimension and a variational principle of Cutler and Olsen[12] is also established.