Mathematica Aeterna, Vol. 3, 2013, no. 7, 565 - 577 A New Approach to the Study of Extended Metric Spaces Surabhi Tiwari Department of Mathematics Motilal Nehru National Institute of Technology Allahabad, U.P., India. Email:
[email protected],
[email protected] James F. Peters Computational Intelligence Laboratory Department of Electrical & Computer Engineering University of Manitoba Winnipeg, Manitoba R3T 51-V6, Canada. Email:
[email protected] Abstract This paper studies the category theoretic aspects of ε-approach near- ness spaces and ε-approach merotopic spaces, respectively, ε ∈ (0, ∞], which are useful in measuring the degree of nearness (resemblance) of objects. Such structures measure the almost nearness of two collections of subsets of a nonempty set. The categories εANear and εAMer are shown to be full supercategories of various well-known categories, including the category sT op of symmetric topological spaces and con- tinuous maps, and the category Met∞ of extended metric spaces and nonexpansive maps. The results in this paper have important practical implications in the study of patterns in similar pictures. Mathematics Subject Classification: 54E05, 54E17, 54C25. Keywords: Approach merotopy, Nearness space, Topological space. 1 Introduction In [13], the two-argument ε-approach nearness was axiomatized for the pur- pose of presenting an alternative approach for completing extended metric spaces. This completion of extended metric spaces was motivated by the recent work on approach merotopic spaces in [7, 6, 4, 5, 16], (see also [2, 3]). In [15], 566 Surabhi Tiwari and James F. Peters ε-approach nearness was used to prove Niemytzki-Tychonoff theorem for sym- metric topological spaces.