Smocked Metric Spaces and their Tangent Cones

Abstract

We introduce the notion of a smocked metric spaces and explore the balls and geodesics in a collection of different smocked spaces. We find their rescaled Gromov-Hausdorff limits and prove these tangent cones at infinity exist, are unique, and are normed spaces. We close with a variety of open questions suitable for advanced undergraduates, masters students, and doctoral students.

66 pages, 32 figures, original research by Prof. Sormani, Dr. Kazaras, and a team of students listed both above as authors and also within v1 at the tops of the sections that they specifically worked on, v2 has minor expository changes, v3 has minor technical revisions