On the Central Ball in a Translation Invariant Involutive Field

The iterated composition of two operators, both of which are involutions and translation invariant, partitions the set of lattice points in the plane into an infinite sequence of discrete parabolas. Each such parabola contains an associated stairway-like path connecting certain points on it, induced by the alternating application of the aforementioned operators. Any two lattice points in the plane can be connected by paths along the square grid composed of steps either on these stairways or towards taxicab neighbors. This leads to the notion of the parabolic-taxicab distance between two lattice points, obtained as the minimum number of steps of this kind needed to reach one point from the other. In this paper, we describe patterns generated by points on paths of bounded parabolic-taxicab length and provide a complete description of the balls centered at the origin. In particular, we prove an earlier conjecture on the area of these balls.