For most classical and similitude groups, we show that each element can be written as a product of two transformations that preserve or almost preserve the underlying form and whose squares are certain scalar maps. This generalizes work of Wonenburger and Vinroot. As an application, we re-prove and slightly extend a well-known result of Mœglin, Vignéras, and Waldspurger on the existence of automorphisms of $p$-adic classical groups that take each irreducible smooth representation to its dual.

We show that the proportion of permutations $g$ in $S_{\!n}$ or $A_{n}$ such that $g$ has even order and $g^{|g|/2}$ is an involution with support of cardinality at most $\lceil n^{{\it\varepsilon}}\rceil$ is at least a constant multiple of ${\it\varepsilon}$. Using this result, we obtain the same conclusion for elements in a classical group of natural dimension $n$ in odd characteristic that have even order and power up to an involution with $(-1)$-eigenspace of dimension at most $\lceil n^{{\it\varepsilon}}\rceil$ for a linear or unitary group, or $2\lceil \lfloor n/2\rfloor ^{{\it\varepsilon}}\rceil$ for a symplectic or orthogonal group.

We study the Cesàro operator on the classical group G and give a necessary and sufficient condition on the index α = α(G) for which the operator is convergent to f(U) for any continuous function f as N → ∞. The result in this paper solves a question posed by Gong in the book Harmonic analysis on classical groups.