Journal of Convex Analysis 32 (2025), No. 3, 789--800
Copyright Heldermann Verlag 2025
On the Infimum of the Upper Envelope of Certain Families of Functions
Biagio Ricceri
Department of Mathematics and Informatics, University of Catania, Italy
ricceri@dmi.unict.it
[Abstract-pdf]
Given a topological space $X$, an interval $I\subseteq {\bf R}$ and five continuous functions $\varphi, \psi, \omega : X\to {\bf R}$, $\alpha, \beta:I\to {\bf R}$, we are interested in the infimum of the function $\Phi:X\to ]-\infty,+\infty]$ defined by $$ \Phi(x)=\sup_{\lambda\in I}(\alpha(\lambda)\varphi(x)+\beta(\lambda)\psi(x))+\omega(x)\,. $$ Using a recent minimax theorem of the author [see {\it Minimax theorems in a fully non-convex setting}, J. Nonlinear Var. Analysis 3 (2019) 45-52], we build a general scheme which provides the exact value of $\inf_X\Phi$ for a large class of functions $\Phi$. When additional compactness conditions are satisfied, our scheme provides also the existence of (explicitly detected) functions $\gamma, \eta:X\to {\bf R}$ such that, for some $\tilde x\in X$, one has $$ \gamma(\tilde x)\varphi(\tilde x)+\eta(\tilde x)\psi(\tilde x)+\omega(\tilde x) = \inf_{x\in X}(\gamma(\tilde x)\varphi(x)+\eta(\tilde x)\psi(x)+\omega(x))\,. $$
Keywords: Infimum, minimax, inf-connectdness, inf-compactness.
MSC: 49J35, 90C47.
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