The Decomposition Problem for bi-Lipschitz maps of spheres

Let LIP(Sn)LIP(\mathbb{S}^n) denote the orientation-preserving homeomorphisms of the nn-sphere that are bi-Lipschitz. For a bi-Lipschitz map, its isometric distortion is the least L1L\geq 1 such that the map is LL-bi-Lipschitz. Decomposition Problem. Let n1n\geq 1 and let fLIP(Sn)f\in LIP(\mathbb{S}^n). Then for every ϵ>0\epsilon>0 there are an integer m1m\geq 1 and homeomorphisms fkLIP(Sn)f_k\in LIP(\mathbb{S}^n), for k=1,,mk=1,\ldots,m, such that

f=fmf1,f=f_m\circ\cdots\circ f_1,

with each fkf_k having isometric distortion at most 1+ϵ1+\epsilon. The problem asks whether every bi-Lipschitz map of a sphere admits such a finite decomposition into maps with arbitrarily small distortion; the supplied context does not establish whether the assertion is known in full generality.

Sources & referencesView supporting material

Primary source

Alastair N. Fletcher and Vyron Vellis, “Decomposing Multitwists”, arXiv:2106.00054 (2022).

Additional references

2 papers in this index state this conjecture (2010–2021). The statement above is taken from the most recent of them; the others are arXiv:1009.3905.

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