Monday, August 12, 2019

real analysis - Is every discontinuous everywhere Darboux function a constant image function?



I've been reading about Darboux functions recently and every example of a everywhere discontinuous Darboux function is also a function such that the image of every non-empty open interval is the image of the entire function. The canonical example being the Conway base-13 function. We will call these functions "constant image" functions for convenience. I was wondering if there were any Darboux functions that are everywhere discontinuous but are not constant image functions.



After discussing this with a colleague we came up with a function that seems to be a Darboux function that does not have this property. Here is a definition of the function we came up with:





Let us define a function f. This function will be similar to the Conway base-13 function. We first express the input in base-11 with digits 09,A such that it does not end in an infinite number of trailing As. If the expansion ends with Ay1y2y3y4 where n:ynA then the function will output 0.y1y2y3y4 as a base-10 number.



This function f is a such that the image of every non-empty open interval is the image of the entire function with an image of [0,1], we now make a new function
g(x)=f(x)+x





This discontinuous everywhere function clearly cannot has an unbounded image but every bounded interval on this function has a bounded image. So it cannot satisfy our property but it appears, intuitively, to be a Darboux function. However a proof that this function is Darboux has escaped us.


Answer



Start with a function f:RR such that f(I)=R for every nonempty open set I. (This can be done very easily: Construct a sequence P1,P2,P3, of pairwise disjoint Cantor sets such that every open interval with rational endpoints contains one of them; choose a surjection fn:PnR for each n; and define f:RR so that f|Pn=fn for each n. No need for any fancy base-13 stuff.)



Define g:RR by setting g(x)=min{f(x),|x|}. It's easy to see that g is an everywhere discontinuous Darboux function, but not a constant image function.


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