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Separate degenerate from non-degenerate examples; mention another degenerate case
Robin Houston
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Which subsets of the plane are similar to all their affine images?

A parabola P in the plane has the nice property that the image of P under any affine transformation is similar to P itself.

Which other subsets of the plane have this property?

I wondered aloud about this on Twitter, where Zeno Rogue gave some additional examples:

  • The complement of a parabola;
  • One connected component of the complement of a parabola;

There are also “degenerate” examples that in some sense vary in only one dimension:

  • Any subset of a line;
  • Any superset of the complement of a line;
  • An open half-plane together with any subset of its boundary;
  • The product of a line with any subset of a line.

Are there other examples? I’m especially interested in examples that don’t fall into the degenerate category.

Robin Houston
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