When is a family of generalized means a scale? (Q1952424)

Let \(U\) and \(I\) be open intervals and \(k_{\alpha }:U\rightarrow \mathbb{R}\), \(\alpha \in I\), be a family of twice continuously differentiable functions satisfying some mild regularity conditions. The author proves that the mapping \(\alpha \mapsto k_{\alpha }^{-1}\left( \sum\limits_{i=1}^{n}w_{i}k_{\alpha }\left( a_{i}\right) \right) \) is a continuous bijection between \(I\) and \(\left( \min \underline{a},\max \underline{a}\right)\) for every fixed non-constant sequence \(\underline{a}=\left( a_{i}\right) _{i=1}^{n}\) with values in \(U\) and every set of the same cardinality and of positive weights \(\underline{w}=\left( w_{i}\right) _{i=1}^{n}\) (we can say that the family \(\left\{ k_{\alpha }:\alpha \in I\right\} \) generates a scale on \(U\)). Moreover, several applications of the obtained result are provided. The new is the extremely short proofs of classical theorems.