Trees,tight extensions of metric spaces,and the cohomological dimension of certain groups: A note on combinatorial properties of metric spaces

The concept of tight extensions of a metric space is introduced, the existence of an essentially unique maximal tight extension T_x—the “tight span,” being an abstract analogon of the convex hull—is established for any given metric space X and its properties are studied. Applications with respect to (1) the existence of embeddings of a metric space into trees, (2) optimal graphs realizing a metric space, and (3) the cohomological dimension of groups with specific length functions are discussed.