Metric differentiation, monotonicity and maps to L^1

Abstract

We give a new approach to the infinitesimal structure of Lipschitz maps into L^1. As a first application, we give an alternative proof of the main theorem from an earlier paper, that the Heisenberg group does not admit a bi-Lipschitz embedding in L^1. The proof uses the metric differentiation theorem of Pauls and the cut metric decomposition to reduce the nonembedding argument to a classification of monotone subsets of the Heisenberg group.