Published online by Cambridge University Press: 19 November 2014
The purpose of the paper is to introduce a novel “splitting” procedure which can be helpful in the derivation of explicit formulas for various Bellman functions. As an illustration, we study the action of the dyadic maximal operator on $L^{p}$. The associated Bellman function $\mathfrak{B}_{p}$, introduced by Nazarov and Treil, was found explicitly by Melas with the use of combinatorial properties of the maximal operator, and was later rediscovered by Slavin, Stokolos and Vasyunin with the use of the corresponding Monge–Ampère partial differential equation. Our new argument enables an alternative simple derivation of $\mathfrak{B}_{p}$.