Archive for 15th March 2010

Manifolds with Density

Spaces M with metrics and measures, so-called metric measure spaces or mm spaces (see e.g. Gromov [G]), include very general singular manifolds and weighted graphs. In the smooth case, M is a Riemannian manifold endowed with a smooth positive function or “density” f;  the prescribed measure is just f times the Riemannian volume. In freshman calculus one studies surfaces and solids of revolution via their generating curves and regions in the halfplane {x>0} with density f(x) = 2πx. All quotient manifolds of Riemannian manifolds and homogeneous spaces G/K are Riemannian manifolds with density, and mm spaces were previously called spaces of homogeneous type (see [CW, pp. 587, 591]). Another example, long important to probabilists, is Euclidean space with Gaussian density.

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