Published online by Cambridge University Press: 20 November 2018
1. Introduction. In 1931, Newman [9] showed that a connected manifold cannot accept arbitrarily small period-n homeomorphisms, for any n > 1. In this paper we are concerned with the existence of chainable continua with arbitrarily small homeomorphisms.
For a long time the only known periodic homeomorphisms of chainable continua had periods 1, 2 or 4 [4]. Recently, Wayne Lewis [8] showed that the pseudo-arc admits periodic homeomorphisms of every order, as well as p-adic cantor group actions. We will see that such homeomorphisms can be made arbitrarily small.
In Section 4, a different chainable indecomposable continuum accepting arbitrarily small period-2 homeomorphisms is constructed.