From Grothendieck to Naor: a stroll through the metric analysis of Banach spaces (Q1645084)

Alexander Grothendieck, in his famous ``Résumé'', initiated the idea of studying Banach spaces through quantitative aspects of their finite-dimensional subspaces. This was implemented, though, only decades later and has led to the so-called local theory of Banach spaces. In recent years, nonlinear aspects have been incorporated into this line of reasoning. It was Martin Ribe who was the first to realise, in the 1970s, that the metric space structure of a Banach space captures part of its linear structure. Investigations of Banach space properties by purely metric quantitative estimates have been subsumed under the title ``Ribe programme'', and Assaf Naor is one of the most prolific contributors to this research area at the intersection of functional analysis, geometry and discrete mathematics. The paper under review nicely surveys some aspects of the Ribe programme and adjacent questions. Its five sections are called: The Ribe programme; The nonlinear versions of the Dvoretzky theorem; Grothendieck inequality and combinatorial optimisation; Extensions of Lipschitz functions; Lipschitz embeddings. The author has succeeded in providing a highly readable introduction to this field which gives readers unfamiliar with the subject a very good orientation. For other surveys of the Ribe programme, see [\textit{A. Naor}, Jpn. J. Math. (3) 7, No. 2, 167--233 (2012; Zbl 1261.46013)] and [\textit{K. Ball}, Astérisque 352, 147--159, Exp. No. 1047 (2013; Zbl 1303.46019)]. One more remark: The paper by \textit{M. Braverman} et al. that is mentioned in the text but does not appear in the reference list was published in [Forum Math. Pi 1, Article ID e4, 42 p. (2013; Zbl 1320.15016)].