Spaces of small metric cotype

Abstract

Naor and Mendel's metric cotype extends the notion of the Rademacher cotype of a Banach space to all metric spaces. Every Banach space has metric cotype at least 2. We show that any metric space that is bi-Lipschitz equivalent to an ultrametric space has infinimal metric cotype 1. We discuss the invariance of metric cotype inequalities under snowflaking mappings and Gromov-Hausdorff limits, and use these facts to establish a partial converse of the main result.