Mathematics

In this note we compare two ways of measuring the n-dimensional "flatness" of a set S⊂Rd, where n∈N and d>n. The first one is to consider the classical Reifenberg-flat numbers α(x,r) (x∈S, r>0), which measure the minimal scaling-invariant Hausdorff distances in Br(x) between S and n-dimensional affine subspaces of Rd. The second is an `intrinsic' approach in which we view the same set S as a metric space (endowed with the induced Euclidean distance). Then we consider numbers a(x,r)'s, that are the scaling-invariant Gromov-Hausdorff distances between balls centered at x of radius r in S and the n-dimensional Euclidean ball of the same radius. As main result of our analysis we make rigorous a phenomenon, first noted by David and Toro, for which the numbers a(x,r)'s behaves as the square of the numbers α(x,r)'s. Moreover we show how this result finds application in extending the Cheeger-Colding intrinsic-Reifenberg theorem to the biLipschitz case. As a by-product of our arguments, we deduce analogous results also for the Jones' numbers β's (i.e. the one-sided version of the numbers α's).