On the equality of Hausdorff measure and Hausdorff content (Q887574)

The main goal of this interesting and lucidly written article is to study situations where the Hausdorff measure \(\mathcal H^s(F)\) and the Hausdorff content \(\mathcal H_\infty^s(F)\) of a subset \(F\) of \([0,1]^n\) are equal in the critical dimension \(s= \dim_H F\). (According to Foran's definition, these sets are known as \(s\)-straight sets.) By virtue of an exhaustion lemma for Hausdorff measure based on the Vitali Covering Theorem, the authors prove that this is in particular the case when \(F\) is a self-similar set, or a graph-directed similar set, regardless of separation conditions (see Corollary 2.3 and Corollary 2.4). They also give several examples falling into natural classes of set for which the equality \(\mathcal H^s(F)=\mathcal H_\infty^s(F)\) fail in general: self-affine sets, self-conformal sets, Julia sets and others (Section 4). Moreover, their main results are applied in studying Alfhors regularity of self-similar sets and related fractals (Section 3) and in addressing the question of whether analogous results can be obtained for packing measure and a suitably defined `packing content' (Section 5). In this case the strong separation condition is needed, however (see Theorem 5.4).