Spread: A Measure of the Size of Metric Spaces

Motivated by Leinster-Cobbold measures of biodiversity, the notion of the spread of a finite metric space is introduced. This is related to Leinster’s magnitude of a metric space. Spread is generalized to infinite metric spaces equipped with a measure and is calculated for spheres and straight lines. For Riemannian manifolds the spread is related to the volume and total scalar curvature. A notion of scale-dependent dimension is introduced and seen for approximations to certain fractals to be numerically close to the Minkowski dimension of the original fractals.