Metric space

Summary

In mathematics, a metric space is a set together with a notion of distance between its elements, usually called points. The distance is measured by a function called a metric or distance function. Metric spaces are the most general setting for studying many of the concepts of mathematical analysis and geometry. The most familiar example of a metric space is 3-dimensional Euclidean space with its usual notion of distance. Other well-known examples are a sphere equipped with the angular distance and the hyperbolic plane. A metric may correspond to a metaphorical, rather than physical, notion of distance: for example, the set of 100-character Unicode strings can be equipped with the Hamming distance, which measures the number of characters that need to be changed to get from one string to another. Since they are very general, metric spaces are a tool used in many different branches of mathematics. Many types of mathematical objects have a natural notion of distance and therefore

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Using arguments developed by De Giorgi in the 1950's, it is possible to prove the regularity of the solutions to a vast class of variational problems in the Euclidean space. The main goal of the present thesis is to extend these results to the more abstract context of metric spaces with a measure. In particular, working in the axiomatic framework of Gol'dshtein – Troyanov, we establish both the interior and the boundary regularity of quasi-minimizers of the p-Dirichlet energy. Our proof works for quite general domains, assuming some natural hypotheses on the (axiomatic) D-structure. Furthermore, we prove analogous results for extremal functions lying in the class of Sobolev functions in the sense of Hajłasz – Koskela, i.e. functions characterized by the single condition that a Poincaré inequality be satisfied. Our strategy to prove these regularity results is first to show that, in a very general setting, the (Hölder) continuity of a function is a consequence of three specific technical hypotheses. This part of the argument is the essence of the De Giorgi method. Then, we verify that for a function u which is a quasi-minimizer in an axiomatic Sobolev space or an extremal Sobolev function in the sense of Hajłasz – Koskela, these technical hypotheses are indeed satisfied and u is thus (Hölder) continuous. In addition to that, we establish the Harnack's inequality for these extremal functions, and we show that the Dirichlet semi-norm of a piecewise-extremal function is equivalent to the sum of the Dirichlet semi-norms of its components.

EPFL2006

EPFL2014

Actions de relations d'équivalence sur les champs d'espaces métriques CAT(0)

Philippe Paul Antoine Henry

This work is dedicated to the study of Borel equivalence relations acting on Borel fields of CAT(0) metric spaces over a standard probability space. In this new framework we get similar results to some theorems proved recently by S. Adams-W. Ballmann or N. Monod concerning groups of isometries of CAT(0) spaces. In Chapter 1, we build several Borel structures on a variety of fields before dealing in particular with Borel fields of CAT(0) spaces. Chapter 2 discusses the notion of an action for an equivalence relation on a field of metric spaces and gives several examples. We also introduce a definition of amenability for equivalence relations in terms of invariant section following an idea of R.J. Zimmer. Chapter 3 deals with the action of an amenable equivalence relation and shows that such a relation cannot act without fixing a section at infinity or preserving a subfield of Euclidean spaces. In Chapter 4, we show that if an equivalence relation is generated by two commuting groups and acts without fixing a section at infinity, then the field splits equivariantly and isometrically as a product. Using this result we also show that equivalence relations containing two coamenable subrelations cannot act without fixing a section at infinity or preserving a subfield of Euclidean spaces.

EPFL2010