Contractive Families on Compact Spaces

Abstract

A family f_1,...,f_n of operators on a complete metric space X is called contractive if there exists lambda < 1 such that for any x,y in X we have d(f_i(x),f_i(y)) leq lambda d(x,y) for some i. Stein conjectured that for any contractive family there is some composition of the operators f_i that has a fixed point. Austin gave a counterexample to this, and asked if Stein's conjecture is true if we restrict to compact spaces. Our aim in this paper is to show that, even for compact spaces, Stein's conjecture is false.