We give a necessary and sufficient condition for a map deffned on a simply-connected quasi-convex metric space to factor through a tree. In case the target is the Euclidean plane and the map is Hölder continuous with exponent bigger than 1/2, such maps can be characterized by the vanishing of some integrals over winding number functions. This in particular shows that if the target is the Heisenberg group equipped with the Carnot-Carathéodory metric and the Hölder exponent of the map is bigger than...

By $F_n\left(X\right)$, $n\ge 1$, we denote the $n$-th symmetric product of a metric space $(X,d)$ as the space of the non-empty finite subsets of $X$ with at most $n$ elements endowed with the Hausdorff metric $d_H$. In this paper we shall describe that every isometry from the $n$-th symmetric product $F_n\left(X\right)$ into itself is induced by some isometry from $X$ into itself, where $X$ is either the Euclidean space or the sphere with the usual metrics. Moreover, we study the $n$-th symmetric product of the Euclidean space up to bi-Lipschitz equivalence and...