Polyhedral compactifications. I (Q6176266)

The paper under review uses non-standard analysis to compactify certain metric spaces. If \(X\) is a \(\mathrm{CAT}(0)\)-space, then a construction by Gromov is to look at the closure \(\bar X\), in \(C(X)\), of the set of horofunctions \(\left\{x \mapsto d(p,x)-d(p,o)\colon p \in X\right\}\), where \(o\) is a fixed base point. The point \(p\) is identified with the function \(d(p,x)-d(p,o)\) and the additional points form the visual boundary \(\partial_\infty X=\bar X \setminus X\). Such boundary points thus appear as limits of sequences of points in \(X\). In the approach of the paper under review, a nonstandard extension \(^*{X}\) of \(X\) is used and the horofunctions are the standard parts of the functions \(x \mapsto \delta(p,x)-\delta(p,o), p \in ^*{X}\). Here \(\delta\) is a possibly asymmetric distance function on \(X\). The main theorem describes the compactification of a finite-dimensional real vector space with an asymmetric polyhedral norm. This compactification is a stratified space, where the strata are indexed by the dual faces of the polytopal unit ball. The combinatorial structure of this space is related to the combinatorial structure of the polytopal unit ball.