Lipschitz stratifications in power-bounded o-minimal fields

Abstract

We propose to grok Lipschitz stratifications from a non-archimedean point of view and thereby show that they exist for closed definable sets in any power-bounded o-minimal structure on a real closed field. Unlike the previous approaches in the literature, our method bypasses resolution of singularities and Weierstrass preparation altogether; it transfers the situation to a non-archimedean model, where the quantitative estimates appearing in Lipschitz stratifications are sharpened into valuation-theoretic inequalities. Applied to a uniform family of sets, this approach automatically yields a family of stratifications which satisfy the Lipschitz conditions in a uniform way.