Monotone and convex restrictions of continuous functions

Abstract

Suppose that $f$ belongs to a suitably defined complete metric space $ {{\cal C}}^{{\alpha}}$ of H\"older $ {\alpha}$-functions defined on $[0,1]$. We are interested in whether one can find large (in the sense of Hausdorff, or lower/upper Minkowski dimension) sets $A {\subset} [0,1]$ such that $f|_{A}$ is monotone, or convex/concave. Some of our results are about generic functions in $ {{\cal C}}^{{\alpha}}$ like the following one: we prove that for the generic $f\in C_{1}^{{\alpha}}[0,1]$, $0\leq {\alpha}<2$ for any $A {\subset} [0,1]$ such that $f|_{A}$ is convex, or concave we have ${\mathrm{dim}}_{\mathrm H} A\leq \underline{\mathrm{dim}}_M A\leq \max \{0, {\alpha}-1 \}.$ On the other hand, we also have some results about all functions belonging to a certain space. For example the previous result is complemented by the following one: for $1< {\alpha}\leq 2$ for any $f\in C^{{\alpha}}[0,1]$ there is always a set $A {\subset}[0,1]$ such that ${\mathrm{dim}}_{\mathrm H} A= {\alpha}-1$ and $f|_{A}$ is convex, or concave on $A$.