On the length of chains in a metric space

Abstract: We obtain an upper bound on the minimal number of points in an $\epsilon$-chain joining two points in a metric space. This generalizes a bound due to Hambly and Kumagai (1999) for the case of resistance metric on certain self-similar fractals. As an application, we deduce a condition on $\epsilon$-chains introduced by Grigor'yan and Telcs (2012). This allows us to obtain sharp bounds on the heat kernel for spaces satisfying the parabolic Harnack inequality without assuming further conditions on the metric. A snowflake transform on the Euclidean space shows that our bound is sharp.