In this paper we connect Calderón and Zygmund’s notion of Lp-differentiability (Calderón and Zygmund, Proc Natl Acad Sci USA 46:1385–1389, 1960) with some recent characterizations of Sobolev spaces via the asymptotics of non-local functionals due to Bourgain, Brezis, and Mironescu (Optimal Control and Partial Differential Equations, pp. 439–455, 2001). We show how the results of the former can be generalized to the setting of the latter, while the latter results can be strengthened in the spirit of the former. As a consequence of these results we give several new characterizations of Sobolev spaces, a novel condition for whether a function of bounded variation is in the Sobolev space W1,1, and complete the proof of a characterization of the Sobolev spaces recently claimed in (Leoni and Spector, J Funct Anal 261:2926–2958, 2011; Leoni and Spector, J Funct Anal 266:1106–1114, 2014).

Given a fixed$p$≠2, we prove a simple and effective characterization of all radial multipliers of $ \mathcal{F}{L^p}\left( {{\mathbb{R}^d}} \right) $ , provided that the dimension$d$is sufficiently large. The method also yields new$L$^{$q$}space-time regularity results for solutions of the wave equation in high dimensions.

We prove the complete monotonicity on $${(0, \infty)^{n}}$$ for suitable inverse powers of the spanning-tree polynomials of graphs and, more generally, of the basis generating polynomials of certain classes of matroids. This generalizes a result of Szegő and answers, among other things, a long-standing question of Lewy and Askey concerning the positivity of Taylor coefficients for certain rational functions. Our proofs are based on two ab-initio methods for proving that $${P^{-\beta}}$$ is completely monotone on a convex cone$C$: the determinantal method and the quadratic-form method. These methods are closely connected with harmonic analysis on Euclidean Jordan algebras (or equivalently on symmetric cones). We furthermore have a variety of constructions that, given such polynomials, can create other ones with the same property: among these are algebraic analogues of the matroid operations of deletion, contraction, direct sum, parallel connection, series connection and 2-sum. The complete monotonicity of $${P^{-\beta}}$$ for some $${\beta > 0}$$ can be viewed as a strong quantitative version of the half-plane property (Hurwitz stability) for$P$, and is also related to the Rayleigh property for matroids.

Given a compact set of real numbers, a random $C^{m + \alpha}$ -diffeomorphism is constructed such that the image of any measure concentrated on the set and satisfying a certain condition involving a real number $s$ , almost surely has Fourier dimension greater than or equal to $s / (m + \alpha)$ . This is used to show that every Borel subset of the real numbers of Hausdorff dimension $s$ is $C^{m + \alpha}$ -equivalent to a set of Fourier dimension greater than or equal to $s / (m + \alpha )$ . In particular every Borel set is diffeomorphic to a Salem set, and the Fourier dimension is not invariant under $C^{m}$ -diffeomorphisms for any $m$ .

In this paper, we show how under the continuum hypothesis one can obtain an integral representation for elements of the topological dual of the space of functions of bounded variation in terms of Lebesgue and Kolmogorov-Burkill integrals.