Topic summary
Distance function
Extracted from the Wikipedia article Metric space.
Riemannian manifolds
The Riemannian metric is uniquely determined by the distance function; this means that in principle, all information about a Riemannian manifold can be recovered from its distance function. One direction in metric geometry is finding purely metric ("synthetic") formulations of properties of Riemannian manifolds. For example, a Riemannian manifold is a CAT(k) space (a synthetic condition which depends purely on the metric) if and only if its sectional curvature is bounded above by k. Thus CAT(k) spaces generalize upper curvature bounds to general metric spaces.