SMALLNESS OF THE SET OF CRITICAL VALUES OF DISTANCE FUNCTIONS IN TWO‐DIMENSIONAL EUCLIDEAN AND RIEMANNIAN SPACES

We study how small is the set of critical values of the distance function from a compact (resp. closed) set in the plane or in a connected complete two-dimensional Riemannian manifold. We show that for a compact set, the set of critical values is compact and Lebesgue null (which is a known result) and that it has "locally" (away from 0) bounded sum of square roots of lengths of gaps (components of the complement). In the planar case, these conditions of local smallness are shown to be optimal. These results improve and generalize those of Fu (1985) and of our earlier paper from 2012. We also find an optimal condition for the smallness of the whole set of critical values of a planar compact set.