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Rigidity of Riemannian embeddings of discrete metric spaces

Differential Geometry 2021-09-22 v2 Metric Geometry

Abstract

Let MM be a complete, connected Riemannian surface and suppose that SM\mathcal{S} \subset M is a discrete subset. What can we learn about MM from the knowledge of all distances in the surface between pairs of points of S\mathcal{S}? We prove that if the distances in S\mathcal{S} correspond to the distances in a 22-dimensional lattice, or more generally in an arbitrary net in R2\mathbb{R}^2, then MM is isometric to the Euclidean plane. We thus find that Riemannian embeddings of certain discrete metric spaces are rather rigid. A corollary is that a subset of Z3\mathbb{Z}^3 that strictly contains Z2×{0}\mathbb{Z}^2 \times \{ 0 \} cannot be isometrically embedded in any complete Riemannian surface.

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Cite

@article{arxiv.2004.08621,
  title  = {Rigidity of Riemannian embeddings of discrete metric spaces},
  author = {Matan Eilat and Bo'az Klartag},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2004.08621},
  year   = {2021}
}

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36 pages