A Sharp Multidimensional Hermite–Hadamard Inequality

Abstract

Let $\Omega \subset {\mathbb{R}}^d $, $d \geq 2$, be a bounded convex domain and $f\colon \Omega \to{\mathbb{R}}$ be a non-negative subharmonic function. In this paper, we prove the inequality $$\begin{equation*} \frac{1}{|\Omega|}\int_{\Omega} f(x)\, \textrm{d}x \leq \frac{d}{|\partial\Omega|}\int_{\partial\Omega} f(x)\, \textrm{d}\sigma(x)\,. \end{equation*}$$Equivalently, the result can be stated as a bound for the gradient of the Saint Venant torsion function. Specifically, if $\Omega \subset{\mathbb{R}}^d$ is a bounded convex domain and $u$ is the solution of $-\Delta u =1$ with homogeneous Dirichlet boundary conditions, then $$\begin{equation*} \|\nabla u\|_{L^\infty(\Omega)} < d\frac{|\Omega|}{|\partial\Omega|}\,. \end{equation*}$$Moreover, both inequalities are sharp in the sense that if the constant $d$ is replaced by something smaller there exist convex domains for which the inequalities fail. This improves upon the recent result that the optimal constant is bounded from above by $d^{3/2}$ due to Beck et al. [2].