Published online by Cambridge University Press: 04 December 2009
Two of the main objects of study in multifractal analysis of measures are the coarse multifractal spectra and the Rényi dimensions. In the 1980s it was conjectured in the physics literature that for ‘good’ measures the following result, relating the coarse multifractal spectra to the Legendre transform of the Rényi dimensions, holds, namely This result is known as the multifractal formalism and has now been verified for many classes of measures exhibiting some degree of self-similarity. However, it is also well known that there is an abundance of measures not satisfying the multifractal formalism and that, in general, the Legendre transforms of the Rényi dimensions provide only upper bounds for the coarse multifractal spectra. The purpose of this paper is to prove that even though the multifractal formalism fails in general, it is nevertheless true that all measures (satisfying a mild regularity condition) satisfy the inverse of the multifractal formalism, namely