Moderately Discontinuous Homotopy

We introduce a metric homotopy theory, which we call moderately discontinuous homotopy, designed to capture Lipschitz properties of metric singular subanalytic germs. It matches with the moderately discontinuous homology theory recently developed by the authors and E. Sampaio. The $k$-th MD homotopy group is a group $MDH^b_{\bullet }$ for any $b\in [1,\infty ]$ together with homomorphisms $MD\pi ^b\to MD\pi ^{b^{\prime}}$ for any $b\geq b^{\prime}$. We develop all its basic properties including finite presentation of the groups, long homotopy sequences of pairs, metric homotopy invariance, Seifert van Kampen Theorem, and the Hurewicz Isomorphism Theorem. We prove comparison theorems that allow to relate the metric homotopy groups with topological homotopy groups of associated spaces. For $b=1$, it recovers the homotopy groups of the tangent cone for the outer metric and of the Gromov tangent cone for the inner one. In general, for $b=\infty $, the $MD$-homotopy recovers the homotopy of the punctured germ. Hence, our invariant can be seen as an algebraic invariant interpolating the homotopy from the germ to its tangent cone. We end the paper with a full computation of our invariant for any normal surface singularity for the inner metric. We also provide a full computation of the MD-homology in the same case.

Lipschitz Normal Embedding Among Superisolated Singularities

Any germ of a complex analytic space is equipped with two natural metrics: the outer metric induced by the hermitian metric of the ambient space and the inner metric, which is the associated riemannian metric on the germ. A complex analytic germ is said Lipschitz normally embedded (LNE) if its outer and inner metrics are bilipschitz equivalent. LNE seems to be fairly rare among surface singularities; the only known LNE surface germs outside the trivial case (straight cones) are the minimal singularities. In this paper, we show that a superisolated hypersurface singularity is LNE if and only if its projectivized tangent cone has only ordinary singularities. This provides an infinite family of LNE singularities, which is radically different from the class of minimal singularities.

Equivalence of the Apollonian and Its Inner Metric

We show that the equivalence of the Apollonian metric and its inner metric remains unchanged by the removal of a point from the domain. For this we need to assume that the complement of the domain is not contained in a hyperplane. This improves a result of the authors wherein the same conclusion was reached under the stronger assumption that the domain contains an exterior point.