1. Introduction
The concept of tower function(s) cut across some areas of science and the problem is sometimes how to identify them. In elementary real analysis, the function for is actually a tower function and it is well known that , , , , etc. However, in the study of matrix algebra, we do encounter the matrices of the type, , , where A is a square matrix. Sometimes, the evaluation(s) of these matrices are highly provocative. It is technically believed that whenever a function is raised to power itself or to order function(s), then we can say that such a function possesses a tower function. Some prototypes are of the form , , , etc. The ideas above are also applicable in building technology. We can now cast some idea of life science into tower function.
Imagine a pregnant woman went to a radiologist for a scan. Naturally, the woman’s chromosome is x; then, the radiologist informs her that she is carrying two female babies. This miracle is indeed a tower function with respect to time when we allow it to be function upon function(s). Suppose that the result of the scan says two baby boys; this is also a tower function with respect to time, i.e., . Finally, if the scan says a boy and a girl, then it is also a tower function with respect to time, i.e., , etc. This concept is naturally a tower function; again, if it is two baby girls, then it is also a tower function with respect to time, i.e., , etc. We allow the positions of the babies to be upwards directed.
In probability theory, the three-tower problem and the concept looks slightly different; a randomly chosen gambler loses a coin and another randomly chosen gambler obtains it. The game continues until one of the three gamblers is ruined.
Somewhere in combinatorial set theory we do encounter tower of infinite ordinals and in elementary calculus, integration of a tower function of the type
is interesting in its own right, and this is also called the infinite Sophomores type dream. When it becomes numeric, it becomes an Ackermann number. In particular, the Sophomores dream tower is of the type
. In metrical fixed point theories, especially, contraction mappings involving such towers appeared first in Okeke and Francis [
1].
In [
2], the celebrated contraction principle due to S. Banach, which appeared in the literature in 1922, is one of the most important and useful results in the metric fixed point theory due to its numerous applications. In Banach’s theorem,
X is taken to be a complete metric space with a metric
d and
is required to be a contraction; that is, there must exist
such that
for all
. The conclusion is that
f has a fixed point, in fact exactly one of them. This has encountered many extensions/generalizations, as recorded in [
3,
4,
5,
6,
7,
8,
9,
10,
11,
12,
13] and references therein. Among these generalizations, we prefer the one given by Geraghty [
5].
More than a decade ago, Amini-Harandi and Emami [
14] characterized the result of Geraghty in the context of a partially ordered complete metric space with some application to ordinary differential equations. Gordji et al. [
15] defined the notion of
-Geraghty type contraction and supposedly improved and extended the results of Amini-Harandi and Emami [
14]. Cho et al. [
16] defined the concept of
-Geraghty contraction type maps in the setting of a metric space and proved the existence and uniqueness of a fixed point of such maps in the context of a complete metric space. Popescu [
17] generalized the results obtained by Cho et al. [
16] and gave other conditions to prove the existence and uniqueness of a fixed point of
-Geraghty contraction type maps in the context of a complete metric space. See also [
18,
19] for other results for the fixed point theory.
It is interesting to know that some results that involved the Banach contraction mapping principle and its allied results involving partially ordered metric spaces have been optimized to the theoretic relation by replacing the partial order relation with a locally
-transitive relation, which remains an optimal condition of transitivity, as recorded in [
20,
21,
22,
23,
24] and some of their references therein.
Recently, Okeke and Francis [
1] first defined a new class of nonlinear mappings in metric spaces, called metric tower mappings, and proved the existence of a fixed point of Geraghty tower-type mappings in complete metric spaces and gave some nontrivial examples that justified the newly defined contraction mapping. Francis and Okeke [
25], defined rational type Geraghty tower contraction mapping and proved the existence of finite and infinite rational Geraghty tower theorem(s) in complete metric spaces.
In 2010, Chistyakov [
26] introduced modular metric space as a natural extension and generalization of classical modular in the sense of Nakano [
27] and classical metric spaces in the sense of Fre’chet [
28]. In fact, metric modular space is a parameterized metric space in extended real line, which may not obey the famous triangular inequality. Chistyakov [
29] extended the famous Banach contraction mapping principle in the setting of modular metric space. Furthermore, similar extension have been carried out by Mongkolkeha et al. [
30], and while their results contained some bugs, these were eventually solved. In the spirit of modular metric spaces, Chaipunya et al. [
31] extended the results in Geraghty [
5] by defining more classes satisfying Geraghty functions, while Okeke et al. [
32] provided a Geraghty-type class that contained several results in the literature. There are numerous studies on Geraghty contraction in various spaces, such as multiplicative,
b metric spaces, partial metric spaces, extended modular metric spaces,
G metric spaces, modular
G metric spaces, etc. Interested reader should consult [
3,
13,
15,
18,
19,
32] and the references therein for other results for fixed point theory.
In this paper, we give a tower type contraction maps which further characterize and include the results in Amini-Harandi and Emami [
14], and some other related contraction types in the literature. We also give a nontrivial supportive example to justify our claims. The results are new and interesting in their own right. The results we establish in this paper extend, improve, and generalize some existing results in the literature.
2. Preliminaries
Throughout the article, is the set of nonnegative integers and is the set of positive real numbers. By a relation (or a binary relation) ⊑ on a set A, we mean a subset of The following results and definitions will be useful in this paper.
Following [
24],
A is a set, ⊑ is a relation on
A, and
are self mappings. We begin with the definitions involving a set theoretic relation.
Definition 1 ([
23])
. A pair of elements satisfying either or is said to be ⊑-comparative. We shall denote such a pair by Definition 2 ([
33])
. For each pair , if , we say that ⊑ is a complete relation. Definition 3 ([
33])
. The inverse of ⊑ is a relation defined by Definition 4 ([
33])
. The symmetric closure of ⊑ is a relation defined by Proposition 1 ([
23])
. Definition 5 ([
33])
. For any subset , the relation on B defined by which is referred as the restriction of ⊑ on B. Definition 6 ([
23])
. For each pair of elements with , if then ⊑ is termed as f-closed. Remark 1. We can improve Definition 6 in the following way: For each pair of elements with , if then ⊑ is termed as -closed. The idea here coincides with that of Definition 6 if .
Proposition 2 ([
21])
. If ⊑ is f-closed, then ⊑ is -closed, Definition 7 ([
23])
. If a sequence A verifies , then we say that is ⊑-preserving. Definition 8 ([
23])
. ⊑
is called ρ-self-closed if each ⊑-preserving convergent sequence in A has a subsequence whose terms are ⊑-comparative with the limit. Definition 9 (
f-
Transitive relation [
21])
. Given a map f: , we say that a relation ⊑ on X is f-transitive if for all such that . From Definition 9, we introduce the following concept.
Definition 10 (-Transitive relation). Let : , we say that a relation ⊑ on X is -transitive if for all such that .
Definition 11 ([
21,
24])
. ⊑
is termed as locally f-transitive if for any ⊑- preserving sequence , the relation (whereas : ) is transitive. Following [
21], we have the definitions below.
Definition 12. ⊑ is called locally -transitive if for any ⊑- preserving sequence , the relation (whereas : ) is transitive.
Remark 2. If , coincide with Definition 11.
Definition 13 ([
22])
. f is termed as ⊑-continuous at if for every ⊑-preserving sequence verifying -continuous map at each point of A is referred as ⊑-continuous. Definition 14 ([
33])
. A binary relation ⊑ defined on any nonempty set A is said to be:- (1)
Reflexive if for all ;
- (2)
Symmetric if implies ;
- (3)
Transitive if implies ;
- (4)
Dichotomous if for all ;
- (5)
Trichotomous if or for all ;
- (6)
Equivalent if ⊑ is reflexive, symmetric, and transitive.
Definition 15 ([
22])
. A metric space is referred as ⊑-complete if each ⊑- preserving Cauchy sequence in A converges. Definition 16 ([
34])
. A partially ordered set is a pair , where A is a set and ⊑ is a binary relation on A such that:- (1)
for every ;
- (2)
if u and v belong to A and and , then ;
- (3)
if and r belong to A and and , then .
Definition 17 ([
5])
. S is the class of functions with:- (i)
;
- (ii)
as .
Definition 18 ([
31])
. For each , let denote the class of n-tuples of functions , where for each , and the following implications holds: implies .It follows that, for each , if , then , where 0 is a zero function.
Remark 3. Note that, if , then we also have the following: implies .
Remark 4. The class of function defined in Definition 17 can equally put to work when we define more functions other than α in that class, S.
Theorem 1 ([
5])
. Let X be a complete metric space. Let with , for all . Let and set for all . Then, in X, with a unique fixed point of f, if and only if for any two subsequences and with , we have that only if . Remark 5. In Theorem 1, we take for any pair of sequences and with , we write and .
Theorem 2 ([
5])
. Let be a contraction on a complete metric space. Let and set for all . Then in X, where a unique fixed point of f in X, if and only if there exists an α in S such that for all : Theorem 3 ([
5])
. Let be a complete metric space and such that there is an satisfying for all . Then, the sequence defined by converges to a unique fixed point of T in X for . The functions of the form , where X is a fixed nonempty set (with at least two elements). Due to the disparity of the arguments, we may (and will) write for all and . In this way, is a one-parameter family of functions . On the other hand, given , we may set for all , so that .
Definition 19 ([
35])
. A function is said to be a metric modular (or simply modular) on X if it satisfies the following three axioms:(i) given if and only if for all ;
(ii) for all and ;
(iii) for all and
Weaker and stronger versions of conditions (i) and (iii) will be of great importance. If, instead of (i), the function satisfies (only) a weaker condition:
(i′) for all and
then is said to be a pseudomodular on X. Furthermore, if, instead of (i), the function satisfies (i) and a stronger condition:
given with for all then is called a strict modular on
A modular (or pseudomodular, or strict modular) on X is said to be convex if, instead of (iii), it satisfied the (stronger) inequality (iv):
(iv) for all and
Remark 6. (a) The assumption in the definition of a pseudomodular does not lead to a greater generality: in fact, setting and in (iii) and taking into account (i’) and (ii), we find:thus, or for all and (b) If is independent of , then, by (i), . Note that is only a pseudomodular on X (by virtue of (i) ).
If does not depend on , then axioms (i)–(iii) mean that ω is an extended metric (extended pseudometric if (i) is replaced by ) on is a metric on X if, in addition, it assumes finite values.
(c) Axiom (i) can be written as and part in it—as . Condition says that for all , and thus, it implies . In other words, means that if for some (and not necessarily for all as in , then . Thus, .
Following [
35], we have the
essential property of a pseudomodular
on
X is its monotonicity: given
, the function
is
nonincreasing on
. In fact, if
, then axioms (iii) (with
) and (i’ ) imply:
As a consequence, given
, at each point
, the limit from the right:
and the limit from the left:
exist in
, and the following inequalities hold, for all
:
To see this, by the monotonicity of
, for any
, we have:
and it remains to pass to the limits as
and
Remark 7. For any , the set is called a modular metric space generated by and induced by ω. If its generator does not play any role in the situation (that is, is independent of generators), we shall write instead of .
A metric modular on is said to be nonincreasing with respect to if for any and such that for any and . We set and
Remark 8. For any , if a metric modular ω on has a finite value and for all , then is a metric on .
Remark 9. Let ω be a modular on X and let be any one of the modular sets defined by ω. Then, define a metric on . If the modular ω is convex, then the modular space can be endowed with another metric given by . These metrics on the modular set are strongly equivalent: , as recorded in [26]. Definition 20 ([
35], Sec. 2.1, page 19).
Let be a modular space. Fix . Set and , where and are said to be modular spaces centered at . Definition 21 ([
26])
. A metric modular on X is said to be nonincreasing with respect to if for any and such that for any and . We set and . Definition 22 ([
31])
. Let be a modular metric space and be a sequence in . Then- (a)
A point is called a limit of if for each there exists such that for all .
A sequence that has a limit is said to be convergent or converges to x, which we write as .
- (b)
A sequence is said to be a modular Cauchy sequence if for each , there exists such that whenever .
- (c)
If every modular Cauchy sequence in converges in , then is said to be complete modular metric space.
Following [
21,
31], we give the following definitions via binary relation in metric modular space.
Definition 23. A modular metric space, is said to be ⊑-complete if each ⊑- preserving Cauchy sequence in converges.
Remark 10. Here, modular completeness and continuity are replaced by their relational analogs, i.e., ⊑-completeness and ⊑-continuity;
Definition 24 ([
30])
. Let ω be a metric modular on X and a modular metric space induced by ω and . A mapping T is called a contraction if for each and for all there exists such that . Definition 25 ([
25])
. Let be a modular metric space and such that there are . Then, T is called a Geraghty metric modular tower contraction map if for all , then: where , , ; , for all distinct . Remark 11. We can possibly interchange position(s) of , and in Definition 25.
Following the construction by Okeke et al. [
32] and Okeke and Francis [
1], it will be useful before spelling out the results of
Section 3. The following analogy will help. For each
, let
be the class of
n-tuples of functions
and for each
, the map
, so that we have the following
. Now for each
, suppose that
, then
, where 0 is a zero function. Again, if
, then
implies
as
. If
, then
is a permutation of
. If
, then its subsequences i.e;
for each
.
for all
, where
.
We will in this work take the class of functions in Definition 18 as , the class of all Geraghty functions.