What should have happened if Hardy had discovered this?

Abstract

First we present and discuss an important proof of Hardy’s inequality via Jensen’s inequality which Hardy and his collaborators did not discover during the 10 years of research until Hardy finally proved his famous inequality in 1925. If Hardy had discovered this proof, it obviously would have changed this prehistory, and in this article the authors argue that this discovery would probably also have changed the dramatic development of Hardy type inequalities in an essential way. In particular, in this article some results concerning power-weight cases in the finite interval case are proved and discussed in this historical perspective. Moreover, a new Hardy type inequality for piecewise constant p = p(x) is proved with this technique, limiting cases are pointed out and put into this frame. Mathematics Subject Classification: 26D15.