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Bibliographic Details
Main Authors: Gartland, Chris, Ostrovskii, Mikhail, Rabani, Yuval, Young, Robert
Format: Preprint
Published: 2026
Subjects:
Online Access:https://arxiv.org/abs/2602.19434
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Table of Contents:
  • We prove that the distortion of any embedding into $L_1$ of the transportation cost space or earth mover distance over a $d$-dimensional grid $\{1,\dots m\}^d$ is $Ω(\log N)$, where $N$ is the number of vertices and the implicit constant is universal (in particular, independent of dimension). This lower bound matches the universal upper bound $O(\log N)$ holding for any $N$-point metric space. Our proof relies on a new Sobolev inequality for real-valued functions on the grid, based on random measures supported on dyadic cubes.