We extend a recent result of Avelin, Hed, and Persson about approximation of functions f that are plurisubharmonic on a domain Ω and continuous on ˙Ω, with functions that are plurisubharmonic on (shrinking) neighborhoods of ˙Ω. We show that such approximation is possible if the boundary of Ω is C0 outside a countable exceptional set E⊂∂Ω. In particular, approximation is possible on the Hartogs triangle. For Hölder continuous u, approximation is possible under less restrictive conditions on E. We next give examples of domains where this kind of approximation is not possible, even when approximation in the Hölder continuous case is possible.

Moduli of path families are widely used to mark curves which may be neglected for some applications. We introduce ordinary and approximation modulus with respect to Banach function spaces. While these moduli lead to the same result in reflexive spaces, we show that there are important path families (like paths tangent to a given set) which can be labeled as negligible by the approximation modulus with respect to the Lorentz Lp,1-space for an appropriate p, in particular, to the ordinary L1-space if p=1, but not by the ordinary modulus with respect to the same space.

This paper studies smoothing properties of the local fractional maximal operator, which is defined in a proper subdomain of the Euclidean space. We prove new pointwise estimates for the weak gradient of the maximal function, which imply norm estimates in Sobolev spaces. An unexpected feature is that these estimates contain extra terms involving spherical and fractional maximal functions. Moreover, we construct several explicit examples, which show that our results are essentially optimal. Extensions to metric measure spaces are also discussed.

It is shown for the non-centered Hardy–Littlewood maximal operator M that ∥DMf∥1≤Cn∥Df∥1 for all radial functions in W1,1(Rn).

We study the decay of approximation numbers of compact composition operators on the Dirichlet space. We give upper and lower bounds for these numbers. In particular, we improve on a result of El-Fallah, Kellay, Shabankhah and Youssfi, on the set of contact points with the unit circle of a compact symbolic composition operator acting on the Dirichlet space $\mathcal{D}$ . We extend their results in two directions: first, the contact only takes place at the point 1. Moreover, the approximation numbers of the operator can be arbitrarily subexponentially small.