Quantifying Completion

Approach uniformities were introduced in Lowen and Windels (1998) as the canonical generalization of both metric spaces and uniform spaces. This text presents in this new context of “quantitative” uniform spaces, a reflective completion theory which generalizes the well-known completions of metric and uniform spaces. This completion behaves nicely with respect to initial structures and hyperspaces. Also, continuous extensions of pseudo-metrics on uniform spaces and (real) compactification of approach spaces can be interpreted in terms of this completion.