Perturbations of measures and sets having curves in d directions

Abstract

We show that whenever a separable subset $S$ of a complete metric space $X$ admits a $d$-dimensional weak tangent field, the set $S$ is close to being $d$-dimensional in the following sense. Whenever $\mu$ is a Borel finite measure on $X$ supported on $S$, then a typical $1$-Lispchitz map (in the sense of Baire category) into a Euclidean space maps $\mu$-almost all of $S$ into a set of Hausdorff dimension at most $d$. When taking $d=0$, this implies that any $1$-purely unrectifiable set is typically carried into a Hausdorff $0$-dimensional set up to a $\mu$-null set. We show that the result is sharp in Euclidean spaces and, more generally, in strictly convex Banach spaces of finite dimension.