We study approximately differentiable functions on metric measure spaces admitting a Cheeger differentiable structure. The main result is a Whitney-type characterization of approximately differentiable functions in this setting. As an application, we prove a Stepanov-type theorem and consider approximate differentiability of Sobolev, $BV$ and maximal functions.

We study classes of mappings between finite and infinite dimensional Banach spaces that are monotone and mappings which are differences of monotone mappings (DM). We prove a Radó-Reichelderfer estimate for monotone mappings in finite dimensional spaces that remains valid for DM mappings. This provides an alternative proof of the Fréchet differentiability a.e. of DM mappings. We establish a Morrey-type estimate for the distributional derivative of monotone mappings. We prove that a locally DM mapping between finite dimensional spaces is also globally DM. We introduce and study a new class of the so-called UDM mappings between Banach spaces, which generalizes the concept of curves of finite variation.

We provide a porosity-based approach to the differentiability and continuity of real-valued functions on separable Banach spaces, when the function is monotone with respect to an ordering induced by a convex cone $K$ with non-empty interior. We also show that the set of nowhere $K$-monotone functions has a $\sigma$-porous complement in the space of continuous functions endowed with the uniform metric.

We study the range of the gradients of a $C^{1,\al}$-smooth bump function defined on a Banach space. We find that this set must satisfy two geometrical conditions: It can not be too flat and it satisfies a strong compactness condition with respect to an appropriate distance. These notions are defined precisely below. With these results we illustrate the differences with the case of $C^1$-smooth bump functions. Finally, we give a sufficient condition on a subset of $X^{\ast}$ so that it is the set of the gradients of a $C^{1,1}$-smooth bump function. In particular, if $X$ is an infinite dimensional Banach space with a $C^{1,1}$-smooth bump function, then any convex open bounded subset of $X^{\ast}$ containing $0$ is the set of the gradients of a $C^{1,1}$-smooth bump function.

Differentiability properties of optimal value functions associated with perturbed optimization problems require strong assumptions. We consider such a set of assumptions which does not use compactness hypothesis but which involves a kind of coherence property. Moreover, a strict differentiability property is obtained by using techniques of Ekeland and Lebourg and a result of Preiss. Such a strengthening is required in order to obtain genericity results.