English

The distance problem via subadditivity

Probability 2025-07-22 v2 Metric Geometry

Abstract

In a recent paper, Aldous, Blanc and Curien asked which distributions can be expressed as the distance between two independent random variables on some separable measured metric space. We show that every nonnegative discrete distribution whose support contains 00 arises in this way, as well as a class of finitely supported distributions with density.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2501.11445,
  title  = {The distance problem via subadditivity},
  author = {Renan Gross},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2501.11445},
  year   = {2025}
}

Comments

10 pages, 2 figures. To appear in Annales Henri Lebesgue

R2 v1 2026-06-28T21:11:16.790Z