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I know that the Baire category theorem can be used to show that

  1. The space of functions $\mathbb{R} \to \mathbb{R}$ differentiable at at least one point is a meager subset of the space of all continuous function $\mathbb{R} \to \mathbb{R}$.
  2. The space of functions $\mathbb{R} \to \mathbb{R}$ that are analytic is a meager subset of the space of all infinitely continuously differentiable (smooth) functions $\mathbb{R} \to \mathbb{R}$.

This suggests a nested hierarchy of meager subsets, with each class of functions with a strictly stronger differentiability property a meager subset of the previous class.

Question: Is this intuition correct? Do "progressively more strongly differentiable" functions form a hierarchy of meager subsets?

I believe it suffices (because of induction) to show the following, so I will rephrase the question to be more precise:

Question: Inside of the space of all differentiable functions $\mathbb{R} \to \mathbb{R}$, is the space of all functions whose derivative is continuous at at least one point (i.e. the space of all functions that are differentiable and continuously differentiable at at least one point) a meager subset?

It's not important to me either way whether "space of all differentiable functions $\mathbb{R} \to \mathbb{R}$" is interpreted to mean either:

  • "space of all functions $\mathbb{R} \to \mathbb{R}$ which are differentiable at every point in $\mathbb{R}$" or
  • "space of all functions $\mathbb{R} \to \mathbb{R}$ which are differentiable at at least one point of $\mathbb{R}$".

Obviously the result being true for the former implies the result also being true for the latter but not necessarily vice versa.

This has been asked elsewhere on the internet before but did not seem to receive a satisfactory answer there. I also was unable to find the answer to this question while searching this site, but I acknowledge it might be a duplicate.

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