Many authors define an isometry of a metric space to be a distance-preserving map of the space onto itself. In this note, we discuss spaces for which surjectivity is a consequence of the distance-preserving property rather than an initial assumption. These spaces include, for example, the three classical (Euclidean, spherical, and hyperbolic) geometries of constant curvature that are usually discussed independently of each other. In this partly expository paper, we explore basic ideas about the isometries of a metric space, and apply these to various familiar metric geometries.

We show that the discrete Hilbert transform and the discrete Kak–Hilbert transform are infinitesimal generators of one-parameter groups of operators in ${{\ell }^{2}}$.

For some Banach spaces of analytic functions in the unit disk (weighted Bergman spaces, Bloch space, Dirichlet-type spaces), the isometric pointwise multipliers are found to be unimodular constants. As a consequence, it is shown that none of those spaces have isometric zero-divisors. Isometric coefficient multipliers are also investigated.

Let E be one of the spaces C(K) and L1, F be an arbitrary Banach space, p > 1, and (X, σ) be a space with a finite measure. We prove that E is isometric to a subspace of the Lebesgue-Bochner space LP(X; F) only if E is isometric to a subspace of F. Moreover, every isometry T from E into Lp(X; F) has the form Te(x) = h(x)U(x)e, e ∊ E, where h: X —> R is a measurable function and, for every x ∊ X, U(x) is an isometry from E to F