On closed convex sets without boundary rays and asymptotes (Q1332531)

In 1959 D. Gale and V. Klee introduced the notion of continuity for closed convex sets in \(\mathbb{R}^ n\): a closed convex set \(X\) is continuous provided that its support functional is continuous. They gave some characterizations of continuous sets, e.g., \(X\) is continuous if and only if it has no boundary rays or asymptotes. The present paper concerns some new properties of the class of continuous sets; in particular, this class is proved to be invariant under linear maps (Theorem 2.2). Further, the authors study two kinds of convergence of convex sets: the convergence in the sense of Painlevé and Kuratowski and the Hausdorff convergence. They prove that the class \({\mathfrak R}\) of continuous sets in \(\mathbb{R}^ n\) is closed with respect to the Hausdorff limit \(\lim_ H\); moreover, if \(C = \lim_ H C_ k\), then \(C \in {\mathfrak R}\) if and only if \(C_ k \in {\mathfrak R}\) for \(k\) sufficiently large (Proposition 3.2). They apply this theorem to compare the two notions of convergence. Finally, they study convex functions with continuous epigraphs. Remark. Let us note that the definition of the Hausdorff distance used in the paper for arbitrary non-empty sets is correct only for compact sets (the formula defines a function only for bounded sets, and it defines a distance only for closed bounded sets). Fortunately this mistake does not affect the results, since the Hausdorff limit can be defined directly without using the Hausdorff distance.