How statement and proof provenance work
The first chip identifies the source of the statement or construction; the second identifies the source of its local proof or verification.
- Literature-sourced: the exact statement appears in a cited source; only wording and notation differ.
- AI-adapted: a semantically identical restatement of literature-sourced material, modulo indexing, notation, and boundary cases adopted by the library.
- AI-generated: a genuinely novel statement formulated by AI, with no source for the claim itself.
These labels describe origin, not correctness: citations and verification chips remain separate evidence.
The word metric is a left-invariant metric and coincides with the path metric of the Cayley graph
Statement
The word metric is a left-invariant metric and coincides with the path metric of the Cayley graph.
Facts & Assumptions
Given: The hypotheses of the Statement.
The word metric of with respect to is (The word metric of a group with respect to a generating set).
Word length is defined on every element and satisfies , , and exactly when is the identity (Word length is defined on every element and satisfies the subadditivity, inversion and vanishing laws).
The word length is the least such that is a product of elements of (Word length of a group element with respect to a generating set).
A metric on a set satisfies separation, symmetry and the triangle inequality (Metric space: iff , symmetry, and the triangle inequality; pseudometric and ultrametric).
The Cayley graph of a group with respect to a subset has vertex set and edge set (The Cayley graph of a group with respect to a subset).
A Cayley graph is connected if and only if its defining subset generates the group (A Cayley graph is connected if and only if the subset generates the group).
The path metric of a connected simple graph assigns to two vertices the least length of a path joining them (The path metric of a connected simple graph).
The path metric of a connected simple graph is a metric on its vertex set (The path metric of a connected simple graph is a metric on its vertex set).
Proof
The three length laws transported by are exactly the three metric axioms.
Left invariance is immediate, since .
A walk of length from to in the Cayley graph is the same datum as an expression for of length once identity generators are discarded, so the two minima agree.
Depends on
- The path metric of a connected simple graph
- The path metric of a connected simple graph is a metric on its vertex set
- The Cayley graph of a group with respect to a subset
- A Cayley graph is connected if and only if the subset generates the group
- Word length of a group element with respect to a generating set
- Word length is defined on every element and satisfies the subadditivity, inversion and vanishing laws
- The word metric of a group with respect to a generating set
- Metric space: $d(x,y) = 0$ iff $x = y$, symmetry, and the triangle inequality; pseudometric and ultrametric
Used by
- A group with the word metric of any generating set is a (1,1)-quasi-geodesic space Corollary
- The Cayley graph of ℤ for the generating set {1} is a line and its word metric is |m-n| Example
- The Cayley graph of ℤⁿ for the standard basis is the integer lattice, and its word metric is the sum of coordinate differences Example
- FALSE: every word metric is invariant under right translation False statement
- A coarse Lipschitz map between word metric spaces of finitely generated groups is Lipschitz Proposition
- Balls of a word metric are finite if and only if the generating set is finite Proposition
- Right translation by a fixed element displaces every point of a word metric space by exactly the word length of that element Proposition
- The word metric is the largest left-invariant metric in which each generator and its inverse lie within distance one of the identity Proposition
- The identity map between the word metrics of two finite generating sets is a bilipschitz equivalence Theorem
Dependency tree · two levels
25 results within two dependency steps of this one, each drawn at its shortest distance from it. An arrow runs from a result to what uses it, so the chart reads left to right and ends at this result, which carries a heavier outline. Every node is a link to that result. Click elsewhere on the chart to enlarge it.
Sources
- C. Loh, Geometric Group Theory: An Introduction (2015 course version), 264 pp. (standard reference, not scraped)
- C. Drutu and M. Kapovich, Geometric Group Theory (with an appendix by B. Nica), 837 pp. (standard reference, not scraped)