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1. (In)equality distance patterns and embeddability into Hilbert spaces

   Alexandru Chirvasitu (October 2022, Palestine journal of mathematics)

   We show that compact Riemannian manifolds, regarded as metric spaces with their global geodesic distance, cannot contain a number of rigid structures such as (a) arbitrarily large regular simplices or (b) arbitrarily long sequences of points equidistant from pairs of points preceding them in the sequence. All of this provides evidence that Riemannian metric spaces admit what we term loose embeddings into finite-dimensional Euclidean spaces: continuous maps that preserve both equality as well as inequality. We also prove a local-to-global principle for Riemannian-metric-space loose embeddability: if every finite subspace thereof is loosely embeddable into a common R^N , then the metric space as a whole is loosely embeddable into R^N in a weakened sense. 

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2. The Liouville theorem for $$p$$-harmonic functions and quasiminimizers with finite energy

   https://doi.org/10.1007/s00209-020-02536-2  

   Björn, Anders; Björn, Jana; Shanmugalingam, Nageswari (February 2021, Mathematische Zeitschrift)

   null (Ed.)

   Abstract We show that, under certain geometric conditions, there are no nonconstant quasiminimizers with finite p th power energy in a (not necessarily complete) metric measure space equipped with a globally doubling measure supporting a global $$p$$ p -Poincaré inequality. The geometric conditions are that either (a) the measure has a sufficiently strong volume growth at infinity, or (b) the metric space is annularly quasiconvex (or its discrete version, annularly chainable) around some point in the space. Moreover, on the weighted real line $$\mathbf {R}$$ R , we characterize all locally doubling measures, supporting a local $$p$$ p -Poincaré inequality, for which there exist nonconstant quasiminimizers of finite $$p$$ p -energy, and show that a quasiminimizer is of finite $$p$$ p -energy if and only if it is bounded. As $$p$$ p -harmonic functions are quasiminimizers they are covered by these results. 

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3. On homogeneous Newton-Sobolev spaces of functions in metric measure spaces of uniformly locally controlled geometry

   https://doi.org/10.1007/s00229-025-01656-5  

   Gibara, Ryan; Kangasniemi, Ilmari; Shanmugalingam, Nageswari (July 2025, Manuscripta mathematica)

   We study the large-scale behavior of Newton-Sobolev functions on complete, connected, proper, separable metric measure spaces equipped with a Borel measure μ with μ(X) = ∞ and 0 < μ(B(x, r)) < ∞ for all x ∈ X and r ∈ (0, ∞). Our objective is to understand the relationship between the Dirichlet space D^(1,p)(X), defined using upper gradients, and the Newton-Sobolev space N^(1,p)(X)+ℝ, for 1 ≤ p < ∞. We show that when X is of uniformly locally p-controlled geometry, these two spaces do not coincide under a wide variety of geometric and potential theoretic conditions. We also show that when the metric measure space is the standard hyperbolic space ℍⁿ with n ≥ 2, these two spaces coincide precisely when 1 ≤ p ≤ n-1. We also provide additional characterizations of when a function in D^(1,p)(X) is in N^(1,p)(X)+ℝ in the case that the two spaces do not coincide. 

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4. A different look at the optimal control of the Brockett integrator

   https://doi.org/10.1080/00207179.2021.1986232  

   D'Alessandro, Domenico; Zhu, Zhifei (October 2021, International Journal of Control)

   We propose a method to analyze the three-dimensional nonholonomic system known as the Brockett integrator and to derive the (energy) optimal trajectories between two given points. For systems with nonholonomic constraint, it is well-known that the energy optimal trajectories corresponds to sub-Riemannian geodesics under a proper sub-Riemannian metric. Our method uses symmetry reduction and an analysis of the quotient space associated with the action of a (symmetry) group on R^3. By lifting the Riemannian geodesics with respect to an appropriate metric from the quotient space back to the original space R^3, we derive the optimal trajectories of the original problem. 

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5. Classification of metric measure spaces and their ends using p-harmonic functions

   https://doi.org/10.54330/afm.120618  

   Björn, Anders; Björn, Jana; Shanmugalingam, Nageswari (March 2022, Annales Fennici Mathematici)

   By seeing whether a Liouville type theorem holds for positive, bounded, and/or finite \(p\)-energy \(p\)-harmonic and \(p\)-quasiharmonic functions, we classify proper metric spaces equipped with a locally doubling measure supporting a local \(p\)-Poincaré inequality. Similar classifications have earlier been obtained for Riemann surfaces and Riemannian manifolds. We study the inclusions between these classes of metric measure spaces, and their relationship to the \(p\)-hyperbolicity of the metric space and its ends. In particular, we characterize spaces that carry nonconstant \(p\)-harmonic functions with finite \(p\)-energy as spaces having at least two well-separated \(p\)-hyperbolic sequences of sets towards infinity. We also show that every such space \(X\) has a function \(f \notin L^p(X) + \mathbf{R}\) with finite \(p\)-energy. 

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