Minimal total absolute curvature for immersions

Abstract

Immersions or maps of closed manifolds in Euclidean space, of minimal absolute total curvature are called tight in this paper. (They were called convex in [25].) After the definition in Chapter 1, many examples in Chapter 2, and some special topics in Chapter 3, we prove in Chapter 4 that topological tight immersions of n-spheres are only of the expected type, namely embeddings onto the boundary of a convex n+1-dimensional body. This generalises a theorem of Chern and Lashof in the smooth case. In Chapter 5 we show that many manifolds exist that have no tight smooth immersion in any Euclidean space. © 1970 Springer-Verlag.