2026-07-072026-07-07http://salesiana.dossiersoluciones.com/handle/123456789/227953We exhibit rigid rotations of spheres as distortion elements in groups of diffeomorphisms, thereby answering a question of J Franks and M Handel. We also show that every homeomorphism of a sphere is, in a suitable sense, as distorted as possible in the group Homeo(S^n), thought of as a discrete group. An appendix by Y de Cornulier shows that Homeo(S^n) has the strong boundedness property, recently introduced by G Bergman. This means that every action of the discrete group Homeo(S^n) on a metric space by isometries has bounded orbits.This is the version published by Geometry & Topology on 26 March 2006 (V7: typesetting corrections)Dynamical SystemsGroup TheoryGeometric Topology37C85, 22F05, 37C05, 57M60, 57S25text