Systolic geometry

In mathematics, systolic geometry is the study of systolic invariants of manifolds and polyhedra, as initially conceived by Charles Loewner and developed by Mikhail Gromov, Michael Freedman, Peter Sarnak, Mikhail Katz, Larry Guth, and others, in its arithmetical, ergodic, and topological manifestations. See also a slower-paced Introduction to systolic geometry. The systole of a compact metric space X is a metric invariant of X, defined to be the least length of a noncontractible loop in X (i.e. a loop that cannot be contracted to a point in the ambient space X). In more technical language, we minimize length over free loops representing nontrivial conjugacy classes in the fundamental group of X. When X is a graph, the invariant is usually referred to as the girth, ever since the 1947 article on girth by W. T. Tutte. Possibly inspired by Tutte's article, Loewner started thinking about systolic questions on surfaces in the late 1940s, resulting in a 1950 thesis by his student Pao Ming Pu. The actual term "systole" itself was not coined until a quarter century later, by Marcel Berger. This line of research was, apparently, given further impetus by a remark of René Thom, in a conversation with Berger in the library of Strasbourg University during the 1961–62 academic year, shortly after the publication of the papers of R. Accola and C. Blatter. Referring to these systolic inequalities, Thom reportedly exclaimed: Mais c'est fondamental! [These results are of fundamental importance!] Subsequently, Berger popularized the subject in a series of articles and books, most recently in the March 2008 issue of the Notices of the American Mathematical Society (see reference below). A bibliography at the Website for systolic geometry and topology currently contains over 160 articles. Systolic geometry is a rapidly developing field, featuring a number of recent publications in leading journals. Recently (see the 2006 paper by Katz and Rudyak below), the link with the has emerged. The existence of such a link can be thought of as a theorem in .