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Answer YCor’s question from the comments
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.


Added: In the comments, YCor asks which subgroup of $\mbox{Aff}(\mathbb{R}^2)$ preserves the graph of $y=x^2$. If my calculations are correct, this group consists of the transformations of the form $$t(s, t) := \left(\begin{array}{cc|c}t-s & 0 & t \\ 2t(t-s) & (t-s)^2 & t^2\end{array}\right)$$ for $s\neq t$. Note that $t(s,t).t(s',t') = t(s'(t-s)+t, t'(t-s) + t)$.

Robin Houston
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