Almost isometric embedding between metric spaces (Q2472736)

This paper is dedicated to the investigation of two new relations of similarity which are quite close to isometry and isometric embedding but that do not preserve distances. Two metric spaces \(X\) and \(Y\) are almost isometric if for every \(\lambda >1\) there is a homeomorphism \(f: X\to Y\) such that \(f\) and \(f^{-1}\) are Lipschitz maps with constant \(\lambda\); the space \(X\) is almost isometrically embedded in \(Y\) if for every \(\lambda>1\) there is an injective map \(f: X\to Y\) such that \(f\) and \(f^{-1}\) are Lipschitz maps with constant \(\lambda\). It was known that any two countable dense subsets of \(\mathbb{R}^n\) are almost isometric and the authors extend this result to any two contable dense subsets of the Urysohn space \(\mathbb U\) (as a consequence, the space \(\mathbb U\) is almost isometry unique). The main results of the paper show: (1) in every separable Hilbert space and in \(\mathbb U\) there are \(2^{\aleph_0}\) many \(\aleph_1\)-dense subsets that are pairwise incomparable under almost isometric embedding; (2) let \(\lambda>\aleph_0\) be a regular cardinal; it is consistent that \(2^{\aleph_0}>\lambda^+\) and that there are \(\lambda^+\) separable metrics on \(\lambda\) such that every separable metric on \(\lambda\) is almost-isometrically embedded into one of them; (3) if \(\aleph_1<\lambda<2^{\aleph_0}\) and \(\lambda\) is a regular cardinal, then for every \(\kappa<2^{\aleph_0}\) and metric spaces \(\{(\lambda,d_i):i<\kappa \}\) there exists an ultra-metric space \((\lambda,d)\) that is not bi-Lipschitz embeddable into \((\lambda,d_i)\) for all \(i<\kappa\); in particular, there is no single metric space \((\lambda_2,d)\) into which every ultra-metric space of cardinality \(\lambda\) is bi-Lipschitz embedded. The paper also contains several other interesting results and open questions.