The periodic points and the invariant set of an ϵ-contractive map Original Research Article

It is shown that the invariant set of an ϵ-contractive map f on a compact metric space X is the same as the set of periodic points of f. Furthermore, the set of periodic points of f is finite and, only assuming that X is locally compact, there is at most one periodic point in each component X. The theorems are applied to prove a known fixed-point theorem, a result concerning inverse limits, a result about periodic points of compositions, and a result showing that ϵ-contractive maps on continua are really contraction maps with a change in metric. It is shown that all our results hold for locally contractive maps on compact metric spaces.