A generalisation of the Babbage functional equation

Abstract

A recent refinement of Ker\'ekj\'art\'o's Theorem has shown that in $\mathbb R$ and $\mathbb R^2$ all $\mathcal C^l$-solutions of the functional equation $f^n =\textrm{Id}$ are $\mathcal C^l$-linearizable, where $l\in \{0,1,\dots \infty\}$. When $l\geq 1$, in the real line we prove that the same result holds for solutions of $f^n=f$, while we can only get a local version of it in the plane. Through examples, we show that these results are no longer true when $l=0$ or when considering the functional equation $f^n=f^k$ with $n>k\geq 2$.