I am currently preparing a talk that revolves around the triangle inequality.


Because this inequality is so well-established, I do not want to (in my talk) belabor too much upon the importance it enjoys. For example, I learned some useful views [here](https://mathoverflow.net/questions/65513/why-the-triangle-inequality). But, these concerns are currently too advanced---for my purposes, I am seeking first some historical background; specifically,



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> Approximately when, where, and how did the concept of a *triangle inequality* get formalized, and its importance recognized?
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**EDIT**
It seems that the above question is not precise or clear enough. How about the slightly clarified question:



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> When was it realized (was it Fréchet's 1906 paper cited in the comments?) that the triangle inequality should be a fundamental axiom for defining distances?
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History of the triangle inequality
There is a discussion of this issue in Dieudonné's *History of Functional Analysis*, p. 115:



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> It may seem obvious to us that the results of Hilbert are but one step removed from what we now call the theory of Hilbert space; but if, in fact, the birth of that theory almost immediately followed the publication of Hilbert's papers, it seems to me that it is due to the fact that this publication precisely occurred during the emergence of a new concept in mathematics, the concept of **structure.**
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> Until the middle of the XIXth century, mathematicians had been dealing with **well determined** mathematical "objects": numbers, points, curves, surfaces, volumes, functions, operators. But the fact that algebraic manipulations on different kinds of "objects" had a strikingly similar appearance soon attracted attention (cf. chap.IV, §3), and after 1840 it gradually became clear that the essence of these manipulations did not lie in the **nature** of the objects, but in the **rules** to be followed in handling them, which might be the same for very different types of objects. However, a precise formulation of this idea had to wait for the adoption of the set-theoretic concepts and language; and it is only in 1895 that our definition of a **group**, on an **arbitrary** underlying set, was formulated by Weber [225]. The trend towards the definition of algebraic structure then gained momentum, and around 1920 all fundamental notions of present-day Algebra had been defined.
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> In Analysis, no similar development had yet occurred in 1900. The extensions of the ideas of limit and continuity which had been formulated always were relative to **special** objects such as curves, surfaces or functions. The possibility of defining such notions in an **arbitrary** set is an idea which undoubtedly was first put forward by Fréchet in 1904 [69], and developed by him in his famous thesis of 1906 [71].
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If I may summarize: the idea that one should talk about mathematical objects in terms of the axioms they should satisfy was itself quite new around 1900, and the specific application of this idea to the triangle inequality seems quite likely to have originated with Fréchet for that reason.


