TITLE: What are the possible images of a square under an area-preserving map?
QUESTION [7 upvotes]: Let S be the open unit square in R^2: the set of points (x,y) with 0 < x < 1 and 0 < y < 1.  Consider an area-preserving smooth map S --> R^2, that is, a map whose Jacobian has determinant 1 at every point.  What can the image of S look like?  
Can the image of the square have a smooth boundary?  I think you can smooth out the two corners on top with a transformation of the form (x,y) --> (x,y+f(x)), but this makes the other two corners sharper.
(I had added, and now removed, some nonsense about Gromov's nonsqueezing theorem, which does not hold in dimension 2, and doesn't say what I thought it said besides.)

REPLY [8 votes]: Your statement of Gromov's theorem is wrong. Of course you can map a square to any rectangle of the same area! Just by diagonal linear matrix with eigenvalues (k, 1/k) (i.e. shrink in one direction, stretch in another). 
Gromov nonsqueezing says $B^{2n}(1)$ can not be put inside $B(r)x\mathbb{C}^{n-1}$ for $B(r)$ - real 2-d ball in $\mathbb{C}$ with $r<1$ by a symplectomorphism. This means by a map that preserve symplectic form, which in turn can be viewed as measuring the "sum of the areas of projections of a 2-d object on the planes x1-y1, x2-y2 ....xn-yn". The non-squeezing in some sense is a statement about not being able to trade these "complex plane" directions for each other. It says nothing about squeezing inside those planes. 
I believe by a general volume preserving map you can take any contractible domain to any other of the same volume...