Customer Reviews

Dictionary of Distances

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1) independently check all claims. The statement "In fact, a manifold is Kobayashi hyperbolic if and only if it is biholomorphic to a bounded homogeneous domain," on p. 106 is blatantly false.

2) this edition has been superseded by the larger (and cheaper on Amazon) "Encyclopedia of Distances" published by Springer in 2009 (ISBN: 978-3-642-00233-5).

This is simply one of the most fascinating recent mathematics books. This book catalogs the amazing variety of metrics that have been developed not only in mathematics, but also biology, chemistry, and physics. Distance, more precisely metrics, have been a key concept in mathematics since Euclid and Frechet's generalization of Euclidean distance to induce a natural topology on abstract sets has been a fundamental building block of modern mathematics. In mathematics distance concepts arise in a variety of applications for example, in probability theory inducing a topology on the space of probability measures, eg Prokhorov metric, or in communications theory assessing how far apart two sequences of symbols are, Hamming distance, which is also used to determine how different two DNA sequences are. The book is expensive and not likely to be purchased by a mathematician specializing in a particular field, so for the mathematician (or the sophisticated mathematical enthusiast) in your life it would be a great gift.