Solution to the Khavinson problem near the boundary of the unit ball

This paper deals with an extremal problem for harmonic functions in the unit ball of $\mathbf{R}^n$. We are concerned with the pointwise sharp estimates for the gradient of real--valued bounded harmonic functions. Our main result may be formulated as follows. The sharp constants in the estimates for the absolute value of the radial derivative and the modulus of the gradient of a bounded harmonic function coincide near the boundary of the unit ball. This result partially confirms a conjecture posed by D. Khavinson.