Denjoy's index and porosity (Q1077559)

This is an interesting expository paper on index introduced and applied by A. Denjoy in 1920-1921. Let \([a,b]\) be a given closed interval and let P be its perfect subset containing a and b. Let \(h_ 0>0\), \(x\in P\), \(x+h_ 0\in P\), then we define \[ \alpha_+(P;x,h_ 0)=\inf \{\alpha:\exists (h_ n),\quad 0<h_{n+1}\leq h_ n\leq \alpha h_{n+1}(n\geq 0),\quad h_ n\to 0,\quad x+h_ n\in P\} \] and \[ \alpha_+(P,x)=\inf \{\alpha_+(P;x,h_ 0):\quad h_ 0>0\} \] is called the right index of P at x. In a similar way the left index of P at x can be defined. As an example of a theorem from Section 1 we can take Theorem 1. If P is nowhere dense and \(A_{\pm}:=\{x:\quad \alpha_{\pm}(x)=+\infty \},\) \(A=A_+\cap A_-\), then all these sets are residual subsets of P. The application of index to obtain deep properties of the second symmetric derivative is given in Section 2. The results obtained in this section the author uses to calculate \(N^ 2_ s\) primitives in Section 3. The index is also applied to first order symmetric derivative and to certain higher order derivatives. For proofs the reader is referred to bibliography, mostly to the second volume of \textit{A. Denjoy's} book: Leçons sur le calcul des coefficients d'une séries trigonométrique (1949; Zbl 0036.319)]. At the end there are some problems.