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Abstract We investigate the Hölder geometry of curves generated by iterated function systems (IFS) in a complete metric space. A theorem of Hata from 1985 asserts that every connected attractor of an IFS is locally connected and path-connected. We give a quantitative strengthening of Hata’s theorem. First we prove that every connected attractor of an IFS is (1/ s )-Hölder path-connected, where s is the similarity dimension of the IFS. Then we show that every connected attractor of an IFS is parameterized by a (1/ α)-Hölder curve for all α > s . At the endpoint, α = s , a theorem of Remes from 1998 already established that connected self-similar sets in Euclidean space that satisfy the open set condition are parameterized by (1/ s )-Hölder curves. In a secondary result, we show how to promote Remes’ theorem to self-similar sets in complete metric spaces, but in this setting require the attractor to have positive s -dimensional Hausdorff measure in lieu of the open set condition. To close the paper, we determine sharp Hölder exponents of parameterizations in the class of connected self-affine Bedford-McMullen carpets and build parameterizations of self-affine sponges. An interesting phenomenon emerges in the self-affine setting. While the optimal parameter s for a self-similar curve in ℝ n is always at most the ambient dimension n , the optimal parameter s for a self-affine curve in ℝ n may be strictly greater than n . 

Let $ \Omega \subset \mathbb{R}^{n+1}$, $ n\geq 2$, be a 1-sided NTA domain (also known as a uniform domain), i.e., a domain which satisfies interior corkscrew and Harnack chain conditions, and assume that $ \partial \Omega $ is $ n$-dimensional Ahlfors-David regular. We characterize the rectifiability of $ \partial \Omega $ in terms of the absolute continuity of surface measure with respect to harmonic measure. We also show that these are equivalent to the fact that $ \partial \Omega $ can be covered $ \mathcal {H}^n$-a.e. by a countable union of portions of boundaries of bounded chord-arc subdomains of $ \Omega $ and to the fact that $ \partial \Omega $ possesses exterior corkscrew points in a qualitative way $ \mathcal {H}^n$-a.e. Our methods apply to harmonic measure and also to elliptic measures associated with real symmetric second order divergence form elliptic operators with locally Lipschitz coefficients whose derivatives satisfy a natural qualitative Carleson condition.