The structure of extended real-valued metric spaces (Q2436680)

Many mathematical structures that have an underlying topology, for example metrics and uniformities, also define various families of bounded sets. A natural class of bounded sets in a metric space is for example the collection of all subsets with finite diameter. A generalized family of bounded subsets of a given set \(X\) is called a bornology on \(X\). Both the collection of all Bourbaki bounded subsets and the collection of all totally bounded subsets of a uniform space are examples of bornologies. A set that is endowed with both a topology and a bornology is called a bornological universe. This article contributes to the recent line of research on the characterization of bornological universes. In particular, bornological universes that are defined by extended metrics are investigated. Here an extended metric is a distance function that satisfies the same axioms as a metric save that it can also attain the value infinity. The text starts with a few results on the structure of extended metric spaces and the definition of a \textit{universal space \(\Delta_X\)} for each Hausdorff space. The space \(\Delta_X\) is a complete extended metric space with the property that for each compatible extended metric \(d\) on \(X\) the space \((X, d)\) can be isometrically embedded into \(\Delta_X\). Moreover, for each compatible metric \(d\) on \(X\) the space that consists of all closed subsets of \(X\) endowed with the Hausdorff distance \(H_d\) can be isometrically embedded into this universal space. In the final section two natural bornologies \(\mathcal{B}_d\) and \(\mathcal{B}_d^w\) are associated with an extended metric \(d\). The author describes some of the properties of these bornologies and gives complete characterizations of bornologies \(\mathcal{B}\) that are equal to either \(\mathcal{B}_d\) of \(\mathcal{B}^w_d\) for some extended metric \(d\).