Bi-Lipschitz embedding metric triangles in the plane

Abstract

A metric polygon is a metric space comprised of a finite number of closed intervals joined cyclically. The second-named author and Ntalampekos recently found a method to bi-Lipschitz embed an arbitrary metric triangle in the Euclidean plane with uniformly bounded distortion, which we call here the tripodal embedding. In this paper, we prove the sharp distortion bound $4\sqrt{7/3}$ for the tripodal embedding. We also give a detailed analysis of four representative examples of metric triangles: the intrinsic circle, the three-petal rose, tripods and the twisted heart. In particular, our examples show the sharpness of the tripodal embedding distortion bound and give a lower bound for the optimal distortion bound in general. Finally, we show the triangle embedding theorem does not generalize to metric quadrilaterals by giving a family of examples of metric quadrilaterals that are not bi-Lipschitz embeddable in the plane with uniform distortion.