Abstract
It is concerned with the continuity of the Hardy-Little wood maximal function between the classical Lebesgue spaces or the Orlicz spaces. A new approach to the continuity of the Hardy-Littlewood maximal function is presented through the observation that the continuity is closely related to the existence of solutions for a certain type of first order ordinary differential equations. It is applied to verify the continuity of the Hardy-Littlewood maximal function from $L^p({\mathbb{R}}^n)$ to $L^q({\mathbb{R}}^n)$ for 1 ${\leq}$ q < p < ${\infty}$.
