Between continuity and isometry - mappings in general distance spaces

J. Heitzig

Between metric spaces, the most powerful kinds of mappings are certainly Lipschitz continuous maps and isometric embeddings. Both notions cannot be expressed in terms of, say, quasi-uniformities, due to their lack of an additive structure.

This talk is about several properties of maps between distance spaces more general than metric spaces, whose distance functions are allowed to take values in quasi-ordered monoids other than the real line.

It is argued that some of these properties are quite close to Lipschitz continuity and isometry, and may serve as their substitutes in quasi-uniform spaces, because each quasi-uniformity comes from a multi-qp-metric (i.e., a distance function taking values in a power of the real line). In addition to many examples, a topological and a geometrical theorem will be given in particular:

(1) Call a map  h  between qp-metric spaces  (X, d)  and  (Y, e)  strongly uniformly continuous iff for all  e > 0,  there is  d > 0
such that whenever  d(x1, y1) + . . . + d(xn, yn)
£ d, 

                then  e(hx1, hy1) + . . . + e(hxn, hyn) £ e.

Theorem. If  X  is a subset of a Banach space whose closure is convex, strong uniform continuity coincides with Lipschitz continuity for all maps from  X  into qp-metric spaces.

(2) Theorem. The continuous maps  h  from  Rn  (n > 1)  to  Rm  that fulfill the implication

                if  | x - y | = | z - w |  then  | hx - hy | = | hz - hw |

are exactly the similarity maps.