Almost Riemannian spaces (Q756721)

The paper examines the local and global properties of almost Riemannian spaces, which are defined to be finite dimensional geodesically and metrically complete inner metric spaces having (metric) curvature locally bounded below. These spaces are shown to be topological manifolds having an infinitesimal approximation by Euclidean space at each point. The proof of this fact uses generalizations of Toponogov's global comparison and maximal diameter theorems, which are valid even for infinite dimensional spaces. The proofs of these generalizations use entirely metric techniques, showing for the first time, even in the Riemannian special case, that the improvement from local to global distance-angle comparisons is purely a metric phenomenon. A Gromov-Hausdorff precompactness theorem for almost Riemannian spaces is also proved.