Lipschitz algebras and Lipschitz-free spaces over unbounded metric spaces

Abstract

We present a way to turn an arbitrary (unbounded) metric space $\mathcal{M}$ into a bounded metric space $\mathcal{B}$ in such a way that the corresponding Lipschitz-free spaces $\mathcal{F}(\mathcal{M})$ and $\mathcal{F}(\mathcal{B})$ are isomorphic. The construction we provide is functorial in a weak sense and has the advantage of being explicit. Apart from its intrinsic theoretical interest, it has many applications in that it allows to transfer many arguments valid for Lipschitz-free spaces over bounded spaces to Lipschitz-free spaces over unbounded spaces. Furthermore, we show that with a slightly modified point-wise multiplication, the space $\rm{Lip}_0(\mathcal{M})$ of scalar-valued Lipschitz functions vanishing at zero over any (unbounded) pointed metric space is a Banach algebra with its canonical Lipschitz norm.