Maximal directional derivatives in Laakso space

Abstract

We investigate the connection between maximal directional derivatives and differentiability for Lipschitz functions defined on Laakso space. We show that maximality of a directional derivative for a Lipschitz function implies differentiability only for a $\sigma$-porous set of points. On the other hand, the distance to a fixed point is differentiable everywhere except for a $\sigma$-porous set of points. This behavior is completely different to the previously studied settings of Euclidean spaces, Carnot groups and Banach spaces. Hence, the techniques used in these spaces do not generalize to metric measure spaces.