Symmetrization and extension of planar bi-Lipschitz maps

Abstract

We show that every centrally symmetric bi-Lipschitz embedding of the circle into the plane can be extended to a global bi-Lipschitz map of the plane with linear bounds on the distortion. This answers a question of Daneri and Pratelli in the special case of centrally symmetric maps. For general bi-Lipschitz embeddings our distortion bound has a combination of linear and cubic growth, which improves on the prior results. The proof involves a symmetrization result for bi-Lipschitz maps which may be of independent interest.