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Nash embedding theorem From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

The Nash embedding theorems (or imbedding theorems ), named after John Forbes Nash, state that every Riemannian can be isometrically embedded into some . Isometric means preserving the length of every path. For instance, bending without stretching or tearing a page of paper gives an isometric embedding of the page into Euclidean space because curves drawn on the page retain the same arclength however the page is bent.

The first theorem is for continuously differentiable ( C1) and the second for analytic embeddings or embeddings that are smooth of class Ck, 3 k . These two theorems are very different from each other; the first one has a very simple proof and is very counterintuitive, while the proof of the second one is very technical but the result is not at all surprising.

The C1 theorem was published in 1954, the Ck-theorem in 1956. The real analytic theorem was first treated by Nash in 1966; his argument was simplified considerably by Greene & Jacobowitz (1971). (A local version of this result was proved by Elie Cartan and Maurice Janet in the 1920s.) In the real analytic case, the smoothing operators (see below) in the Nash inverse function argument can be replaced by Cauchy estimates. Nash's proof of the Ck- case was later extrapolated into the h-principle and Nash–Moser implicit function theorem. A simplified proof of the second Nash embedding theorem was obtained by Günther (1989) who reduced the set of nonlinear partial differential equations to an elliptic system, to which the contraction mapping theorem could be applied.

Nash–Kuiper theorem ( C1 embedding theorem)

Theorem. Let ( M,g) be a and ƒ:Mm Rn a short C-embedding (or ) into Euclidean space Rn, where n m+1. Then for arbitrary > 0 there is an embedding (or immersion) m n ƒε : M → R which is

(i) in class C1, (ii) isometric: for any two vectors v,w ∈ Tx(M) in the tangent space at x ∈ M, , (iii) -close to ƒ: |ƒ(x) − ƒ(x)| < for all x ∈ M.

In particular, as follows from the Whitney embedding theorem, any m-dimensional Riemannian manifold admits an isometric C1-embedding into an arbitrarily small neighborhood in 2 m-dimensional Euclidean space.

The theorem was originally proved by John Nash with the condition n m+2 instead of n m+1 and generalized by Nicolaas Kuiper, by a relatively easy trick.

The theorem has many counterintuitive implications. For example, it follows that any closed oriented Riemannian surface can be C1 isometrically embedded into an arbitrarily small ball in Euclidean 3-space (from the Gauss–Bonnet theorem, there is no such C2-embedding). And, there exist C 1 isometric embeddings of the hyperbolic plane in R3.

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Ck embedding theorem

The technical statement is as follows: if M is a given m-dimensional Riemannian manifold (analytic or of class C k, 3 k ), then there exists a number n (with n m(3m+11)/2 if M is a compact manifold, or n m(m+1)(3 m+11)/2 if M is a non-compact manifold) and an injective map f : M Rn (also k analytic or of class C ) such that for every point p of M, the d fp is a from the n tangent space T pM to R which is compatible with the given inner product on T pM and the standard of Rn in the following sense:

 u, v  = dfp(u) · d fp(v) for all vectors u, v in T pM. This is an undetermined system of partial differential equations (PDEs).

The Nash embedding theorem is a global theorem in the sense that the whole manifold is embedded into Rn. A local embedding theorem is much simpler and can be proved using the implicit function theorem of advanced calculus. The proof of the global embedding theorem relies on Nash's far-reaching generalization of the implicit function theorem, the Nash–Moser theorem and Newton's method with postconditioning (see ref.). The basic idea of Nash's solution of the embedding problem is the use of Newton's method to prove the existence of a solution to the above system of PDEs. The standard Newton's method fails to converge when applied to the system; Nash uses smoothing operators defined by convolution to make the Newton iteration converge: this is Newton's method with postconditioning. The fact that this technique furnishes a solution is in itself an existence theorem and of independent interest. There is also an older method called Kantorovich iteration that uses Newton's method directly (without the introduction of smoothing operators). References

 Greene, Robert E.; Jacobowitz, Howard (1971), "Analytic Isometric Embeddings", Annals of Mathematics (The Annals of Mathematics, Vol. 93, No. 1) 93 (1): 189–204, doi:10.2307/1970760, http://jstor.org/stable/1970760  Günther, Matthias (1989), "Zum Einbettungssatz von J. Nash [On the embedding theorem of J. Nash]", Math. Nachr. 144 : 165–187, doi:10.1002/mana.19891440113  Han, Qing; Hong, Jia-Xing (2006), Isometric Embedding of Riemannian in Euclidean Spaces , American Mathematical Society, ISBN 0821840711 1  Kuiper, N.H. (1955), "On C -isometric imbeddings I", Nederl. Akad. Wetensch. Proc. Ser. A. 58 : 545–556. 1  Nash, John (1954), "C -isometric imbeddings", Annals of Mathematics (The Annals of Mathematics, Vol. 60, No. 3) 60 (3): 383–396, doi:10.2307/1969840, http://www.jstor.org/stable/1969840.  Nash, John (1956), "The imbedding problem for Riemannian manifolds", Annals of Mathematics 63 (1): 20–63, doi:10.2307/1969989, MR0075639, http://www.jstor.org/stable/1969989.  Nash, John (1966), "Analyticity of the solutions of implicit function problem with analytic data", Annals of Mathematics (The Annals of Mathematics, Vol. 84, No. 3) 84 (3): 345–355, doi:10.2307/1970448, http://jstor.org/stable/1970448. Retrieved from "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nash_embedding_theorem" Categories: | Mathematical theorems

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