Diese Einfuhrung in das Gebiet der metrischen Raume richtet sich in erster Linie nicht an Spezialisten, sondern an Anwender der Methode aus den verschiedensten Bereichen der Naturwissenschaften. Besonders ausfuhrlich und anschaulich werden die Grundlagen von metrischen Raumen und Banach-Raumen erklart, Anhange enthalten Informationen zu verschiedenen Schlusselkonzepten der Mengentheorie (Zornsches Lemma, Tychonov-Theorem, transfinite Induktion usw.). Die hinteren Kapitel des Buches beschaftigen sich mit fortgeschritteneren Themen.

Presents up-to-date Banach space results. * Features an extensive bibliography for outside reading. * Provides detailed exercises that elucidate more introductory material.

Metric Fixed Point Theory has proved a flourishing area of research for many mathematicians. This book aims to offer the mathematical community an accessible, self-contained account which can be used as an introduction to the subject and its development. It will be understandable to a wide audience, including non-specialists, and provide a source of examples, references and new approaches for those currently working in the subject.

This is a monograph on fixed point theory, covering the purely metric aspects of the theory–particularly results that do not depend on any algebraic structure of the underlying space. Traditionally, a large body of metric fixed point theory has been couched in a functional analytic framework. This aspect of the theory has been written about extensively. There are four classical fixed point theorems against which metric extensions are usually checked. These are, respectively, the Banach contraction mapping principal, Nadler’s well known set-valued extension of that theorem, the extension of Banach’s theorem to nonexpansive mappings, and Caristi’s theorem. These comparisons form a significant component of this book. This book is divided into three parts. Part I contains some aspects of the purely metric theory, especially Caristi’s theorem and a few of its many extensions. There is also a discussion of nonexpansive mappings, viewed in the context of logical foundations. Part I also contains certain results in hyperconvex metric spaces and ultrametric spaces. Part II treats fixed point theory in classes of spaces which, in addition to having a metric structure, also have geometric structure. These specifically include the geodesic spaces, length spaces and CAT(0) spaces. Part III focuses on distance spaces that are not necessarily metric. These include certain distance spaces which lie strictly between the class of semimetric spaces and the class of metric spaces, in that they satisfy relaxed versions of the triangle inequality, as well as other spaces whose distance properties do not fully satisfy the metric axioms.

Metric fixed point theory encompasses the branch of fixed point theory which metric conditions on the underlying space and/or on the mappings play a fundamental role. In some sense the theory is a far-reaching outgrowth of Banach's contraction mapping principle. A natural extension of the study of contractions is the limiting case when the Lipschitz constant is allowed to equal one. Such mappings are called nonexpansive. Nonexpansive mappings arise in a variety of natural ways, for example in the study of holomorphic mappings and hyperconvex metric spaces. Because most of the spaces studied in analysis share many algebraic and topological properties as well as metric properties, there is no clear line separating metric fixed point theory from the topological or set-theoretic branch of the theory. Also, because of its metric underpinnings, metric fixed point theory has provided the motivation for the study of many geometric properties of Banach spaces. The contents of this Handbook reflect all of these facts. The purpose of the Handbook is to provide a primary resource for anyone interested in fixed point theory with a metric flavor. The goal is to provide information for those wishing to find results that might apply to their own work and for those wishing to obtain a deeper understanding of the theory. The book should be of interest to a wide range of researchers in mathematical analysis as well as to those whose primary interest is the study of fixed point theory and the underlying spaces. The level of exposition is directed to a wide audience, including students and established researchers.

Written by a team of leading experts in the field, this volume presents a self-contained account of the theory, techniques and results in metric type spaces (in particular in G-metric spaces); that is, the text approaches this important area of fixed point analysis beginning from the basic ideas of metric space topology. The text is structured so that it leads the reader from preliminaries and historical notes on metric spaces (in particular G-metric spaces) and on mappings, to Banach type contraction theorems in metric type spaces, fixed point theory in partially ordered G-metric spaces, fixed point theory for expansive mappings in metric type spaces, generalizations, present results and techniques in a very general abstract setting and framework. Fixed point theory is one of the major research areas in nonlinear analysis. This is partly due to the fact that in many real world problems fixed point theory is the basic mathematical tool used to establish the existence of solutions to problems which arise naturally in applications. As a result, fixed point theory is an important area of study in pure and applied mathematics and it is a flourishing area of research.