The intrinsic geometry of some random manifolds (Q507774): Difference between revisions

In the paper [the authors with \textit{S. Weinberger}, ``The reach of randomly embedded manifolds'', Preprint, \url{arXiv:1503.01733}] the limiting behavior of the global reach of a sequence of random manifolds embedded in Euclidean spheres of increasing dimensions was investigated. In this paper the authors look more closely at these random embeddings, and show that the results of [loc. cit.] can be extended to show the convergence not only of the reaches of the embedded manifolds, but, in an appropriate sense, of the manifolds themselves, along with their induced Riemannian structures. More specifically, the authors consider the following setup, effectively equivalent to that in [loc. cit.]: Let \(f\) be a smooth Gaussian process with a centered, unit variance on a compact, smooth manifold \(M\). Let \(f_1, f_2,\ldots\) be a sequence of independent copies of \(f\), \(f^k= (f_1, \ldots , f_k)\) and define an embedding \(h^k\) of \(M\) into \({\mathbb R}^k\) by \(h^k(x)= {1\over{\sqrt{k}}} f^k(x)\). \textbf{Definition.} A sequence of compact \({\mathcal C}^i\) Riemannian manifolds \((M_k, g_k)\) is said to converge in the \({\mathcal C}^i\) topology to a \({\mathcal C}^i\) manifold \((M, g)\) if, for large enough \(k\), we can find \({\mathcal C}^i\) embeddings \(H_k:\) \(M\to M_k\) such that the pullbacks \(H_k^*g_k\) converge to \(g\) on \(M\) in the \({\mathcal C}^i\) topology. Section 2 gives some notations and quotes some basic results relating to Gaussian processes on manifolds. In Section 3 the main result of the paper is stated. \textbf{Theorem.} Let \((M, g)\) be a connected, orientable, compact, \({\mathcal C}^3\) Riemannian manifold and \(f: M\to {\mathbb R}\) a zero mean Gaussian process with a.s. (almost surely) \({\mathcal C}^3\) sample paths inducing the metric \(g\). Let \(g_E^k\) denote the metric induced on \(h^k(M)\) by the Euclidean metric in \({\mathbb R}^k\). Then, with probability one, \((H^k(M), g_E^k) \mapsto (M, g)\), where the convergence \(\mapsto\) is as in Definition 2.2. Section 4 focuses on a particular family of functionals, such as volume and surface area. The final Section 5 contains the proofs of the results in Section 4.