ISSN 1364-0380 (on line) 1465-3060 (printed) 67 Geometry & Topology G T GG T T T Volume 3 (1999) 67–101 G T G T G T G T Published: 28 May 1999 T G T G T G T G T G G G G T T Embeddings from the point of view of immersion theory : Part I Michael Weiss Department of Mathematics, University of Aberdeen Aberdeen, AB24 3UE, UK Email:
[email protected] Abstract Let M and N be smooth manifolds without boundary. Immersion theory suggests that an understanding of the space of smooth embeddings emb(M, N) should come from an analysis of the cofunctor V 7→ emb(V, N) from the poset O of open subsets of M to spaces. We therefore abstract some of the properties of this cofunctor, and develop a suitable calculus of such cofunctors, Goodwillie style, with Taylor series and so on. The terms of the Taylor series for the cofunctor V 7→ emb(V, N) are explicitly determined. In a sequel to this paper, we introduce the concept of an analytic cofunctor from O to spaces, and show that the Taylor series of an analytic cofunctor F converges to F . Deep excision theorems due to Goodwillie and Goodwillie–Klein imply that the cofunctor V 7→ emb(V, N) is analytic when dim(N) − dim(M) ≥ 3. AMS Classification numbers Primary: 57R40 Secondary: 57R42 Keywords: Embedding, immersion, calculus of functors Proposed: Ralph Cohen Received: 10 May 1998 Seconded: Haynes Miller, Gunnar Carlsson Revised: 5 May 1999 c Geometry & Topology Publications 68 Michael Weiss 0 Introduction Recently Goodwillie [9], [10], [11] and Goodwillie–Klein [12] proved higher ex- cision theorems of Blakers–Massey type for spaces of smooth embeddings.