Large Scale Geometry by Nowak and Yu
BULLETIN (New Series) OF THE AMERICAN MATHEMATICAL SOCIETY Volume 52, Number 1, January 2015, Pages 141–149 S 0273-0979(2014)01460-0 Article electronically published on August 20, 2014 Large scale geometry, by P. Nowak and G. Yu, EMS Textbooks in Mathematics, European Mathematical Society, Zu¨rich, 2012, xiv+189 pp., ISBN 978-3-03719- 112-5, AC38.00, $41.80 Everyone knows that many phenomena are best studied at one scale or another, and that deep problems often involve the interactions of several scales. From the broad conception of our understanding of physics, based on the atomic hypothesis to the germ theory of disease to the success of calculus with its move to the infin- itesimal, the value of the study of phenomena at small scales and the techniques of integrating such information to the macroscopic level are now the most basic intuition in the scientific world view—with attendant backlashes against “blind reductionism”. In the subject of global geometry, the important general direction of “under- standing manifolds under some condition of curvature” is of this sort. Curvature is the infinitesimal measure of how the space di®ers from Euclidean space, and one tries to obtain global conclusions from uniform assumptions on this type of local hypothesis. There is also another extreme: going from the cosmic, the large scale, back to the local. In retrospect, at least, one can see this trend in, say, Liouville’s theorem that bounded analytic functions are constant: boundedness is a large scale condition; surely, if one looks from a very large scale, a bounded function should not be viewed as di®erent than a constant, and Liouville’s theorem tells us that under a condition of analyticity, the large scale information tells all.
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