Hodge Theory on Metric Spaces

Hodge theory is a beautiful synthesis of geometry, topology, and analysis, which has been developed in the setting of Riemannian manifolds. On the other hand, spaces of images, which are important in the mathematical foundations of vision and pattern recognition, do not fit this framework. This motivates us to develop a version of Hodge theory on metric spaces with a probability measure. We believe that this constitutes a step towards understanding the geometry of vision. The appendix by Anthony Baker provides a separable, compact metric space with infinite dimensional α-scale homology. email: [email protected] and [email protected] www: http://www.uni-math.gwdg.de/schick Laurent Bartholdi and Thomas Schick were partially supported by the Courant Research Center “Higher order structures in Mathematics” of the German Initiative of Excellence Steve Smale was supported in part by the NSF and the Toyota Technological Institute, Chicago email: [email protected]