Vietoris–Rips complex

In topology, the Vietoris–Rips complex, also called the Vietoris complex or Rips complex, is a way of forming a topological space from distances in a set of points. It is an abstract simplicial complex that can be defined from any metric space M and distance δ by forming a simplex for every finite set of points that has diameter at most δ. That is, it is a family of finite subsets of M, in which we think of a subset of k points as forming a (k − 1)-dimensional simplex (an edge for two points, a triangle for three points, a tetrahedron for four points, etc.); if a finite set S has the property that the distance between every pair of points in S is at most δ, then we include S as a simplex in the complex.