Tuesday, 18 October 2016

Restricted Cauchy equation on a non-dense domain



It is really well known that if f:RR is continuous and
x,yR,f(x+y)=f(x)+f(y)
then f is linear, i.e., there exists aR such that f(x)=ax for all xR.



More generally, it is known that if f:KR is continuous, where KR is a non-empty open connected set with K+KK, then the functional equation
(x,y)K2,f(x+y)=f(x)+f(y)()
implies that f is linear.




Here a related question:




Question. Does there exist a set SR2 which is not dense in R2, not containing an open connected set, and such that if f:RR is continuous function satisfying () for all (x,y)S then f is linear?




Easy observation: S cannot be bounded (see also the comment of TheoBandit below). Indeed, in the opposite, we could set f(x)=0 for all x in a ball with sufficiently large radius; then, any continuous extension will work.


Answer



Yes, there is such a domain. Consider,
S=nZ{(x,nx):xR}.

Note that S is not dense and has empty interior. I claim that, if f:RR is continuous and satisfies
f(x+y)=f(x)+f(y)
for all (x,y)S, then f is scalar homogeneous. First, note that (0,0)S, hence
f(0+0)=f(0)+f(0)f(0)=0.
Next, suppose n1 is an integer. I wish to show that f(nx)=nf(x) for all x. We proceed by induction.



The base case is clear. Suppose f(nx)=nf(x) for some n. Then, because (x,nx)S, we have
f((n+1)x)=f(x+nx)=f(x)+f(nx)=f(x)+nf(x)=(n+1)f(x).
The claim holds by induction.




Similarly, this holds for n<0. If we assume n0 is such that f(nx)=nf(x), then
f(x)+f((n1)x)=f(x+(n1)x)=f(nx)=nf(x),
which implies f((n1)x)=(n1)f(x) as required. By induction,
f(nx)=nf(x)nZ,xR.



Next, as you might guess, we establish rational scalar homogeneity. However, this follows directly from the integer scalar homogeneity. We have
qf(pqx)=f(qpqx)=f(px)=pf(x)f(pqx)=pqf(x)
where p,qZ and q0.



Since the rationals are dense in R, we must have f(λx)=λf(x) for any real λ, hence f is linear.



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