Abstract. This note characterizes those functions on the unit circle that can arise as the radial limit function of a harmonic function on the unit disc.Let D denote the unit disc and T the unit circle. A classical result of Alice Roth [8] (or see Chapter IV, §5 of Gaier [4]) characterizes those functions on T that can be expressed as lim r→∞ f (re iθ ) for some entire function f . She showed that these are precisely the Baire-one functions on T (that is, pointwise limits of sequences from C(T)) that are constant on each (connected) component of some relatively open dense subset of T. More recently, Boivin and Paramonov [3] established (in particular) an analogue of Roth's result for harmonic functions on the plane: in this case the radial limit functions are characterized as those Baire-one functions on T that are first-degree polynomials of θ on each component of some relatively open dense subset of T. The purpose of this note is to solve the corresponding problem for radial boundary limits of harmonic functions on the unit disc. We will say that a function f : T → R is asymptotically mean-valued at e iθ if 1 2t (θ−t,θ+t) f (e iφ )dφ → f (e iθ ) as t → 0 + .
Theorem 1. Let f : T → R. The following statements are equivalent: (a) there is a harmonic function h on D such that h(rw) → f (w) as r → 1− for each w ∈ T; (b) f is Baire-one, and there is a relatively open dense subset J of T such that f is locally bounded and asymptotically mean-valued on J.
Furthermore, if (b) holds, then (a) holds with the additional property that the function w → sup 0≤r<1 |h(rw)| is locally bounded on J.Proof. To prove the theorem, we suppose firstly that condition (a) holds. Then f is obviously Baire-one. For each k ∈ N, let J k denote the interior, relative to T, of the compact setSince k K k = T, it follows by a Baire category argument that the (relatively open) set J = k J k is dense in T. Clearly f is locally bounded in J, so it remains to check that f is asymptotically mean-valued at an arbitrary point w of J. To do this, we choose k such that w ∈ J k and define u to be the Poisson integral in D of