Abstract. This article is dedicated to the answer to the following question: "Which characteristic functions can be expressed as the product of two or more bounded derivatives?".The real line (-00, 00) is denoted by R, the set of integers by Z and the set of positive integers by N. The only measure used is Lebesgue measure in R and each integral should be interpreted as the corresponding Lebesgue integral. The distance between two nonempty subsets A, B of 1 will be denoted by q(A, B) (i.e. q(A, B) = M{\x-y\: x £A,y £B}). For each set A cR, let int A denote its (Euclidean) interior, cl^l its closure, frA its boundary, \A\ its outer measure and Xa its characteristic function.All functions will be real functions of a real variable. If / is an interval (throughout this paper we deal only with nondegenerate intervals), then 3(1) denotes the family of all derivatives defined on / (in the case of an endpoint of / that belongs to / we consider the corresponding one-sided condition). Let 31 denote 3(R).The terms " ¿/-closed", " ¿-interior" ( ri-int), etc., refer to the Denjoy topology (density topology) on R. For each set T £ R and each interval /, let