Published online by Cambridge University Press: 20 November 2018
We study the range of the gradients of a ${{C}^{1,\alpha }}$ -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 ${{X}^{*}}$ 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 ${{X}^{*}}$ containing 0 is the set of the gradients of a ${{C}^{1,1}}$-smooth bump function.