An extension of the Cartwright-McMullen theorem in fractional calculus for the smooth Stieltjes case

Abstract

In 1976, Donald Cartwright and John McMullen characterized axiomatically the Riemann-Liouvile fractional integral in a paper that was published in 1978. The motivation for their work was to answer affirmatively to a conjecture stated by J. S. Lew a few years before, in 1972. Essentially, their ``Cartwright-McMullen theorem in fractional calculus'' proved that the Riemann-Liouville fractional integral is the only continuous extension of the usual integral operator to positive real orders, in such a way that the Index Law holds. In this paper, we propose an analogous result for the uniqueness of the extension of the Stieltjes integral operator, in the case of a smooth integrator.