Jobst Heitzig

Distance and Topology- Back to the Roots of Topology with a General Concept of Distance Jobst Heitzig

The aim of this book is threefold: to reinstate distance functions as a principal tool of general topology, to promote the use of distance functions on various mathematical objects and a thinking in terms of distances also in nontopological contexts, and to make more specific contributions to distance theory. We start by learning the basic properties of distance, endowing all kinds of mathematical objects with a distance function, and studying interesting kinds of mappings between such objects. This leads to new characterizations of many well-known types of mappings. Then a suitable notion of distance spaces is developed, general enough to induce most topological structures, and we study topological properties of mappings like the concept of strong uniform continuity. Important results include a new characterization of the similarity maps between Euclidean spaces, and generalizations of completion methods and fixed point theorems, most notably of the famous one by Brouwer. We close with a short study of distance visualization techniques.