On Lipschitz selections of affine-set valued mappings (Q5955173)

Let \((H,\|\cdot \|)\) be a Hilbert space and \(F\) a set-valued mapping from a metric space \((M,d)\) into the family \(A_k(H)\) of all affine subsets of \(H\) of dimension at most \(k\). The paper is devoted to the following Main Problem: Find conditions on \(F\) under which there exists a selection \(f\) of \(F\) satisfying the Lipschitz condition \(|f|_{ \text{Lip}(M;H)}: =\inf\{C>0: \|f(x)-f(y) \|\leq Cd(x,y), x,y\in M\}< \infty\). The main result states that the answer can be formulated in the spirit of the classical Helly intersection theorem. The author proves that if for every subset \(N\) of \(M\) consisting of at most \(2^{k+1}\) points the restriction \(F'\) of \(F\) to \(N\) has a Lipschitz selection \(f'\) with \(|f' |_{\text{Lip} (N;H)}\leq 1\), then \(F\) has a Lipschitz selection \(f\) with \(|f|_{ \text{Lip}(M;H)}\) bounded by a constant depending only on \(k\), and the number \(2^{k+1}\) is in general sharp. The interest in the purely geometric Main Problem is motivated by its intimate connections with the classical Whitney extension problem: Given a function \(f\) defined on a closed set \(S\subset \mathbb{R}^n\), find a necessary and sufficient condition for \(f\) to be the restriction to \(S\) of a smooth function on \(\mathbb{R}^n\). The main result of the paper provides a geometrical tool for reducing the Whitney extension problem to the case of finite subsets of \(\mathbb{R}^n\) with a prescribed number of points.