Published online by Cambridge University Press: 20 November 2018
In 1964, J. J. Charatonik in [1] introduced a new class of mappings, the so-called confluent mappings, which comprises the classes of open, monotone and quasi-interior mappings (see [20]). In 1966, A. Lelek started working on confluent mappings with applications to continua theory (see [7]). He introduced two other classes of mappings, the so-called weakly confluent and pseudo confluent mappings, he proved the invariance of rational continua under open, monotone and quasi-interior mappings and he asked about their invariance under confluent mappings. In 1976, E. D. Tymchatyn gave an example of a confluent mapping, which does not preserve the rationality of a curve (see [18]).