UC Santa Barbara

In this paper, we show how convex analysis can be applied to the theory of sets that are "positive" with respect to a continuous quadratic form on a Banach space. Monotone sets can be considered as a special case of positive sets, and we show how our results lead to very efficient proofs of a number of results on monotone sets. One of the key techniques that we use is a generalization of the Fitzpatrick function from monotone set theory to an analogous function for positive sets. © Heldermann Verlag.