Stretch factor 2026-10-14
For an injective function that does not increase distances, one stretch-factor convention measures the largest compression that must be undone:If the sharp Lipschitz constant of is one, this equals bi-Lipschitz distortion. Fixing the scale matters: uniform compression has stretch factor two in this convention, but bi-Lipschitz distortion one. In a geometric spanner, the corresponding stretch factor is the largest graph-route distance divided by direct Euclidean distance; the graph-to-Euclidean identification does not increase distances. [ref]
https://people.scs.carleton.ca/~michiel/encyc_geometric_spanners.pdf. Gudmundsson, Narasimhan and Smid, Geometric Spanners, §1: the stretch-factor convention
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