Fuzzy metrics and statistical metric spaces

TL;DR: The aim of this paper is to apply the concept of fuzziness to the clasical notions of metric and metric spaces and to compare the obtained notions with those resulting from some other, namely probabilistic statistical, generalizations of metric spaces.

Abstract: The adjective "fuzzy" seems to be a very popular and very frequent one in the contemporary studies concerning the logical and set-theoretical foundations of mathematics. The main reason of this quick development is, in our opinion, easy to be understood. The surrounding us world is full of uncertainty, the information we obtain from the environment, the notions we use and the data resulting from our observation or measurement are, in general, vague and incorrect. So every formal description of the real world or some of its aspects is, in every case, only an approxima­ tion and an idealization of the actual state. The notions like fuzzy sets, fuzzy orderings, fuzzy languages etc. enable to handle and to study the degree of uncertainty mentioned above in a purely mathematic and formal way. A very brief survey of the most interest­ ing results and applications concerning the notion of fuzzy set and the related ones can be found in [l]. The aim of this paper is to apply the concept of fuzziness to the clasical notions of metric and metric spaces and to compare the obtained notions with those resulting from some other, namely probabilistic statistical, generalizations of metric spaces. Our aim is to write this paper on a quite self-explanatory level the references being necessary only for the reader wanting to study these matters in more details.