The Hermite-Hadamard inequality in higher dimensions

Abstract

The Hermite-Hadamard inequality states that the average value of a convex function on an interval is bounded from above by the average value of the function at the endpoints of the interval. We provide a generalization to higher dimensions: let $\Omega \subset \mathbb{R}^n$ be a convex domain and let $f:\Omega \rightarrow \mathbb{R}$ be a convex function satisfying $f \big|_{\partial \Omega} \geq 0$, then $$ \frac{1}{|\Omega|} \int_{\Omega}{f ~d \mathcal{H}^n} \leq \frac{2 \pi^{-1/2} n^{n+1}}{|\partial \Omega|} \int_{\partial \Omega}{f~d \mathcal{H}^{n-1}}.$$ The constant $2 \pi^{-1/2} n^{n+1}$ is presumably far from optimal, however, it cannot be replaced by 1 in general. We prove slightly stronger estimates for the constant in two dimensions where we show that $9/8 \leq c_2 \leq 8$. We also show, for some universal constant $c>0$, if $\Omega \subset \mathbb{R}^2$ is simply connected with smooth boundary, $f:\Omega \rightarrow \mathbb{R}_{}$ is subharmonic, i.e. $\Delta f \geq 0$, and $f \big|_{\partial \Omega} \geq 0$, then $$ \int_{\Omega}{f~ d \mathcal{H}^2} \leq c \cdot \mbox{inradius}(\Omega) \int_{\partial \Omega}{ f ~d\mathcal{H}^{1}}.$$ We also prove that every domain $\Omega \subset \mathbb{R}^n$ whose boundary is 'flat' at a certain scale $\delta$ admits a Hermite-Hadamard inequality for all subharmonic functions with a constant depending only on the dimension, the measure $|\Omega|$ and the scale $\delta$.