On metric Ramsey-type phenomena

The main question studied in this article may be viewed as a nonlinear analogue of Dvoretzky's theorem in Banach space theory or as part of Ramsey theory in combinatorics. Given a finite metric space on n points, we seek its subspace of largest cardinality which can be embedded with a given distortion in Hilbert space. We provide nearly tight upper and lower bounds on the cardinality of this subspace in terms of n and the desired distortion. Our main theorem states that for any epsilon>0, every n point metric space contains a subset of size at least n^{1-\epsilon} which is embeddable in Hilbert space with O(\frac{\log(1/\epsilon)}{\epsilon}) distortion. The bound on the distortion is tight up to the log(1/\epsilon) factor. We further include a comprehensive study of various other aspects of this problem.Comment: 67 pages, published versio

Low-distortion embeddings of graphs with large girth

The main purpose of the paper is to construct a sequence of graphs of constant degree with indefinitely growing girths admitting embeddings into $\ell_1$ with uniformly bounded distortions. This result answers the problem posed by N. Linial, A. Magen, and A. Naor (2002).Comment: Some confusing omissions are corrected in the second versio

Metric Cotype

We introduce the notion of metric cotype, a property of metric spaces related to a property of normed spaces, called Rademacher cotype. Apart from settling a long standing open problem in metric geometry, this property is used to prove the following dichotomy: A family of metric spaces F is either almost universal (i.e., contains any finite metric space with any distortion > 1), or there exists α > 0, and arbitrarily large n-point metrics whose distortion when embedded in any member of F is at least Ω((log n)^α). The same property is also used to prove strong non-embeddability theorems of L_q into L_p, when q > max{2,p}. Finally we use metric cotype to obtain a new type of isoperimetric inequality on the discrete torus

Fixed point property for a CAT(0) space which admits a proper cocompact group action

We prove that if a geodesically complete $\mathrm{CAT}(0)$ space $X$ admits a proper cocompact isometric action of a group, then the Izeki-Nayatani invariant of $X$ is less than $1$. Let $G$ be a finite connected graph, $\mu_1 (G)$ be the linear spectral gap of $G$, and $\lambda_1 (G,X)$ be the nonlinear spectral gap of $G$ with respect to such a $\mathrm{CAT}(0)$ space $X$. Then, the result implies that the ratio $\lambda_1 (G,X) / \mu_1 (G)$ is bounded from below by a positive constant which is independent of the graph $G$. It follows that any isometric action of a random group of the graph model on such $X$ has a global fixed point. In particular, any isometric action of a random group of the graph model on a Bruhat-Tits building associated to a semi-simple algebraic group has a global fixed point