VERY GOOD: This book is in very good condition, showing only a few signs of use and wear. The book opens as if it were new, but the spine's cover has faded slightly. It was printed on acid-free paper.
Product Details
This textbook is Volume 33 in the American Mathematical Society'sGraduate Studies in Mathematics series.
Continued from the Preface: "Course description. The objective of this book is twofold. First of all, we wanted to give a detailed exposition of basic notions and techniques in the theory of length spaces, a theory which experienced a very fast development in the past few decades and penetrated into many other mathematical disciplines (such as Group Theory, Dynamical Systems, and Partial Differential Equations). However, we have a wider goal of giving an elementary introduction into a broad variety of the most geometrical topics in geometry—the ones related to the notion of distance. This is the reason why we included metric introductions to Riemannian and hyperbolic geometries. This book tends to work with 'easy-to-touch' mathematical objects by means of 'easy-to-visualize' methods. There is a remarkable book [Gro3], which gives a vast panorama of 'geometrical mathematics from a metric viewpoint'. Unfortunately, Gromov's books seems hardly accessible to graduate students and non-experts in geometry. One of the objectives of this book is to bridge the gap between students and researchers interested in metric geometry, and modern mathematical literature.
"Prerequisite. It is minimal. We set a challenging goal of making the core part of the book accessible to first-year graduate students. Our expectations of the reader's background gradually grow as we move further in the book. We tried to introduce and illustrate most of new concepts and methods by using their simplest case and avoiding technicalities that take attention away from the gist of the material."
