Monotonicity properties of the family of trapezoidal maps (Q2640958)

Trapezoidal maps considered in the paper are unimodal endomorphisms of the interval, piecewise linear with three linear pieces of which the middle one is constant. The space of such maps can be explicitly parametrized by the slopes of non-constant pieces and the length of the ``plateau''. The maps are classified according to their ``behavior'', which is the kneading sequence if it is aperiodic, and the kneading sequence together with the position of the periodic orbit in a standardized coordinate in the periodic case. The first main result is that the equivalence classes with the same behavior form a foliation of the space of maps. Certain properties of this foliation are discussed. Apart from its intrinsic interest, this may show a way to proving a similar statement for smooth unimodal maps, which would be very much appreciated. However, a sharp difference with the smooth case is shown by the second main result that the union of all aperiodic leaves has zero measure.