English

Unifying large scale and small scale geometry

Metric Geometry 2018-04-12 v2 General Topology Geometric Topology

Abstract

A topology on a set XX is the same as a projection (i.e. an idempotent linear operator) cl:2X2Xcl:2^X\to 2^X satisfying Acl(A)A\subset cl(A) for all AXA\subset X. That's a good way to summarize Kuratowski's closure operator. Basic geometry on a set XX is a dot product :2X×2X2Y\cdot:2^X\times 2^X\to 2^Y. Its equivalent form is an orthogonality relation on subsets of XX. The optimal case is if the orthogonality relation satisfies a variant of parallel-perpendicular decomposition from linear algebra. We show that this concept unifies small scale (topology, proximity spaces, uniform spaces) and large scale (coarse spaces, large scale spaces). Using orthogonality relations we define large scale compactifications that generalize all well-known compactifications: Higson corona, Gromov boundary, \v{C}ech-Stone compactification, Samuel-Smirnov compactification, and Freudenthal compactification.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.1803.09154,
  title  = {Unifying large scale and small scale geometry},
  author = {Jerzy Dydak},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1803.09154},
  year   = {2018}
}

Comments

21 pages, 2nd version significantly expanded, in particular the concept of large scale compactifications is introduced

R2 v1 2026-06-23T01:04:01.863Z