analysis (differential/integral calculus, functional analysis, topology)
metric space, normed vector space
open ball, open subset, neighbourhood
convergence, limit of a sequence
compactness, sequential compactness
continuous metric space valued function on compact metric space is uniformly continuous
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A short map is a well-behaved sort of morphism of metric spaces (or a generalisation of metric spaces, such as the extended quasi-pseudo-versions, or gauge spaces or prometric spaces).
Short maps go by many names in the literature, such as non-expansive functions, distance-nonincreasing maps and weak contractions.
A function is short if for every where and are respectively the metrics (or generalisations of metrics) on and .
If and are (or may be) gauge spaces and so have several (pseudo)metrics on them, then we require that, for every gauging distance on , there exists a gauging distance on such that the above inequality holds for all and .
We define to be the category whose objects are Lawvere metric spaces and whose morphisms are short maps.
is complete and admits a faithful functor from Ban (the category of Banach spaces and short linear operators).
may be made into an -category by taking short maps as the tight morphisms and some more generous notion of maps (such as continuous maps) as the loose morphisms.
If instead we use ordinary metric spaces, which includes the axioms of finiteness , symmetry , and separability ( implies ), then the category (with short maps as morphisms) is not so nice as . For example, fails to have arbitrary products , on account of the finiteness axiom where the putative distance
may not exist as a finite number. However, if all the ordinary metric spaces are uniformly bounded in diameter, then this formula does give the product. Note well though that the topology induced by this product will not be the same as the product topology (cf. the discussion below).
is used to give a denotational semantics to Fuzz, a functional language with a linear type system.
There are many other kinds of maps between metric spaces; continuous maps and uniformly continuous maps are more general, while isometries and contractions are more restrictive. What's so special about short maps that we consider them the proper morphisms between metric spaces?
One answer is to look at Lawvere's characterisation of metric spaces as certain enriched categories; see Lawvere metric space. Then the short maps are precisely the enriched functors between metric spaces.
Another answer is to consider what the category-theoretic isomorphisms between metric spaces are; by the definition of metric spaces as structured sets, these are the global isometries. So for a good notion of morphism, we need to recover global isometries as isomorphisms. Using continuous or uniformly continuous maps, we recover homeomorphisms or uniform homeomorphisms as isomorphisms, which are too general; this really gives us the category of metrisable topological spaces or of metrisable uniform spaces rather than the category of metric spaces. Using contractions, we do not even get a category; the identity function is not a contraction. We could still use global isometries themselves as morphisms, but since this defines a groupoid, we should look for a more general notion of morphism that still gives global isometries as isomorphism. And short maps do that.
Short maps give the category of metric spaces some nice properties. In particular, is complete, which does not hold using either global isometries or distance-preserving maps as morphisms. This interacts with the properties of the category of Banach spaces; as a Banach space may be defined as a set with compatible vector-space and metric-space structures, so a Banach space morphism is a function that is both linear and short: the short linear maps.
In every object admits an injective hull . The space is compact if is compact. Furthermore every compact metric space has an injective boundary that is the smallest subspace of such that .
Injective objects have been studied in
Aronszajn, Nachman, and Prom Panitchpakdi. “Extension of uniformly continuous transformations and hyperconvex metric spaces.” Pacific Journal of Mathematics 6.3 (1956): 405-439.
Isbell, John R. “Six theorems about injective metric spaces.” Commentarii Mathematici Helvetici 39.1 (1964): 65-76.
Anton Petrunin, “Lectures on metric geometry” 2020, PDF.
An overview of results is included in
Last revised on December 18, 2023 at 16:01:01. See the history of this page for a list of all contributions to it.