The stability properties of the family ℳ of all intersections of closed balls are investigated in spaces C(K), where K is an arbitrary Hausdorff compact space. We prove that ℳ is stable under Minkowski addition if and only if K is extremally disconnected. In contrast to this, we show that ℳ is always ball stable in these spaces. Finally, we present a Banach space (indeed a subspace of C[0, 1]) which fails to be ball stable, answering an open question. Our results rest on the study of semicontinuous functions in Hausdorff compact spaces.

In this paper we study the size of the value set of the Carmichael λ-functions.

Assume that a Banach space has a Fréchet differentiable and locally uniformly convex norm. We show that the reflexive property of the Banach space is not only sufficient, but also a necessary condition for the fulfillment of the proximal extremal principle in nonsmooth analysis.

In this paper, we examine the rate of convergence of moving block bootstrap (MBB) approximations to the distributions of normalized sample quantiles based on strongly mixing observations. Under suitable smoothness and regularity conditions on the one-dimensional marginal distribution function, the rate of convergence of the MBB approximations to distributions of centered and scaled sample quantiles is of order O(n−1¼ log logn).

Let P denote the set of prime numbers, and let P(n) denote the largest prime factor of an integer n > 1. We show that, for every real number , there exists a constant c(η) > 1 such that for every integer a ≠ 0, the set has relative asymptotic density one in the set of all prime numbers. Moreover, in the range , one can take c(η) = 1+ε for any fixed ε > 0. In particular, our results imply that for every real number 0.486 ≤ b.thetav; ≤ 0.531, the relation P(q − a) ≍ qθ holds for infinitely many primes q. We use this result to derive a lower bound on the number of distinct prime divisor of the value of the Carmichael function taken on a product of shifted primes. Finally, we study iterates of the map q ↦ P(q - a) for a > 0, and show that for infinitely many primes q, this map can be iterated at least (log logq)1+o(1) times before it terminates.

We give two charaterizations of the Möbius invariant QK spaces, one in terms of a double integral and the other in terms of the mean oscillation in the Bergman metric. Both charaterizations avoid the use of derivatives. Our results are new even in the case of Qp.