Similarity, topology, and uniformity (Q1044669)

The author presents a very general concept of a generalized metric space. For convenience, he turns around the ordering in the target domain of the generalized metrics and then speaks of similarity instead of distance. Starting from an extremely general situation without axioms, he examines which axioms or additional properties are needed to obtain useful results. For instance, he shows that commutativity and associativity of the generalized version of addition occurring in the triangle inequality are not really needed, nor does he require any generalized version of subtraction. Each similarity space comes with its own domain of possible similarity values. Therefore, he considers non-expanding functions modulo some rescaling between different domains of similarity values. He shows that non-expanding functions with locally varying rescaling functions correspond to topologically continuous functions, while non-expanding functions with a globally fixed rescaling generalize uniformly continuous functions. Self-uniform globally transitive similarity spaces correspond to quasi-uniform spaces, and symmetric self-uniform globally transitive similarity spaces to uniform spaces. In these cases, global continuity of functions w.r.t. similarity spaces is equivalent to uniform continuity w.r.t. the corresponding (quasi-)uniform spaces.