Wednesday, November 27, 2019

functional equations - Strange Examples of Involutory Functions?

I am very interested in functions γ:RR with the following property:
γ2(x)=x
One form of a function satisfying this is
f(x)=ax1+bx
Which has the property f2(x)=x. Infinitely many more functions with this property can be obtained by finding some other injective function g, its inverse g1, and then composing g,g1, and f as follows:
g1fg

However, I am not very interested in involutory functions of this form, since they seem to all be ripoffs of the general form that I already stated.



In fact, it seems that all involutory functions can be put in the form
g1fg
for some g, and for some a,b. I can't find any counterexamples, but I don't know how to prove it either. It seems to me that the best way to approach this would be to set up some kind of differential equation like
(ff)(x)=1f(x)
But I have absolutely no idea how I might show that any involutory function can be put in the aforementioned form.



Any ideas?




NOTE: I'm sure there are some elaborate piecewise-defined answers that can destroy my conjecture. However, I can't expect people to know what I mean when I ask to prove this for all "reasonable" functions - so I will establish some stricter restrictions on γ. The function must be expressible using some finite composition of these functions and their inverses:
ϕ1(x,a)=x+a
ϕ2(x,a)=ax
ϕ3(x,a)=xa
ϕ4(x,a)=ax
For example, x2+x+1 can be expressed as
ϕ1(ϕ3(x,2),ϕ1(x,1))

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