The reach, metric distortion, geodesic convexity and the variation of tangent spaces (Q2324602)

The authors consider two concepts of metric distortion and reach of set which characterize the size of topological features. In the first part of this paper, the authors provide tight bounds on metric distortion for sets of positive reach. These metric distortion results are so general that they can be regarded as a new characterization of sets of positive reach and allows the authors to show that the intersection of a set of positive reach with a ball with radius less than the reach is geodesically convex. This result can be considered as a far reaching extension of a result of the first author and \textit{S. Oudot} [``Provably good surface sampling and approximation'', in: Proceedings of the 2003 Eurographics/ACM SIGGRAPH symposium on geometry processing, SGP'03. New York, NY: Association for Computing Machinery (ACM). 9--18 (2003; \url{doi:10.5555/882370.882372})]. The second part of the paper is devoted to the problem of bounds for the angle between tangent spaces at different points in terms of the reach and the distance between the two points.