Nash embedding theorems

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The Nash embedding theorems (or imbedding theorems), named after John Forbes Nash Jr., state that every Riemannian manifold can be isometrically embedded into some Euclidean space. Isometric means preserving the length of every path. For instance, bending but neither stretching nor tearing a page of paper gives an isometric embedding of the page into three-dimensional Euclidean space because curves drawn on the page retain the same arc length however the page is bent. The first theorem is for continuously differentiable (C1) embeddings and the second for embeddings that are analytic or smooth of class Ck, 3 ≤ k ≤ ∞. These two theorems are very different from each other. The first theorem has a very simple proof but leads to some counterintuitive conclusions, while the second theorem has a technical and counterintuitive proof but leads to a less surprising result. The C1 theorem was published in 1954, and the Ck theorem in 1956. The real analytic theorem was first treated by Nash in 1966...

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