Symmetric and strongly symmetric homeomorphisms on the real line with non-symmetric inversion (Q2030269)

An increasing homeomorphism \(h:\mathbb R\rightarrow\mathbb R\) is quasisymmetric, \(h \in QS(\mathbb R)\), if \(M^{-1} \leq (h(x+t) - h(x))/(h(x) -h(x-t)) \leq M\) for all \(x \in\mathbb R\) and \(t> 0\) and \(h \in QS(\mathbb R)\) belongs to the symmetric class \( S(\mathbb R)\) if \( \lim_{t \rightarrow 0} (h(x+t) - h(x))/(h(x) -h(x-t)) = 1\) uniformly for all \(x \in\mathbb R\). Quasisymmetric and symmetric quasisymmetric mappings play a central role in the theory of plane quasiconformal mappings and Teicmüller theory. The main result of the paper states that there is \(h \in S(\mathbb R)\) but \(h^{-1}\) is not symmetric. Earlier it has been known that \(S(\mathbb R)\) is not a topological group, see [\textit{M. A. Brakalova}, Anal. Math. Phys. 8, No. 4, 541--549 (2018; Zbl 1414.30047)] and [\textit{H. Yun} et al., Proc. Am. Math. Soc. 146, No. 10, 4255--4263 (2018; Zbl 1404.30031)]. The construction is explicit and rather complicated and, among other properties of quasisymmetric mappings, it is shown that \( S(\mathbb R)\) is not closed under composition. The authors also consider the class of strongly quasisymmetric homeomorphism \(h\) in \(\mathbb R\) which satisfy \(|h(E)|/|h(I)| \leq c_1(|E|/|I|)^{c_2}\) whenever \(I\) is an interval and \(E \subset I\) is a measurable set, see [\textit{S. W. Semmes}, Trans. Am. Math. Soc. 306, No. 1, 233--263 (1988; Zbl 0653.30008)], and show that this class is not preserved under taking the inverse and composition.