Differentiability of Lipschitz curves in $p$-Banach spaces

Abstract

The problem of differentiating Lipschitz curves in Banach spaces goes back to Tamarkin in the early 1930s and is one of the origins of the Radon--Nikodým property in classical Banach space theory. In this article we characterize those quasi-Banach spaces $X$ for which every Lipschitz curve $F\to \mathbb{R}\to X$ admits a point of differentiability and prove that this property holds if and only if $X$ is isomorphic to a Banach space with the Radon--Nikodým property, thus substantiating a conjecture of Kalton, communicated personally to the first-named author in 2008. Equivalently, every nonlocally convex quasi-Banach space admits a nowhere differentiable Lipschitz curve. Our result is obtained from a quantitative characterization of local convexity in terms of the infinitesimal oscillation of Lipschitz curves. Motivated by this obstruction, we then investigate positive differentiability phenomena in ${\ell }_p$, $0<p<1$, and identify natural decoupled-coordinate constructions for which Lipschitz regularity nevertheless implies almost-everywhere differentiability. We also contrast this behavior with metric differentiability for the natural metric and the quasi-metric on ${\ell }_p$.