A new notion of angle between three points in a metric space (Q499886)

The notion of angle is of fundamental importance in classical geometry, and it is intimately connected with the notion of distance. Therefore, one natural problem is to define a notion of angle for any three ordered points. This paper introduces such a notion, which coincides with the standard notion when the metric space is the Euclidean space. For a general metric space, there is no uniquely defined angle for any ordered three points. Instead, the angles form a closed interval. ``We show that in general the angle cone is not single-valued [\dots] but if we endow the metric space with a positive Borel measure \(\mathfrak m\) obtaining the metric measure space \((X, d, \mathfrak m)\), then under quite general assumptions (which include many fundamental examples as Riemannian manifolds, finite-dimensional Alexandrov spaces with curvature bounded from below, Gromov-Hausdorff limits of Riemannian manifolds with Ricci curvature bounded from below, and normed spaces with strictly convex norm), fixed \(p, q \in X\), the angle cone at \(x\) is single-valued for \(\mathfrak m\)-a.e. \(x\in X\). We prove some basic properties of the angle cone (such as the invariance under homotheties of the space) and we analyze in detail the case \((X, d, \mathfrak m)\) is a measured-Gromov-Hausdorff limit of a sequence of Riemannian manifolds with Ricci curvature bounded from below, showing the consistency of our definition with a recent construction of Honda.''