7. The Whitney Theorems
In this lecture we prove two celebrated theorems of Whitney:
- The Whitney Embedding Theorem, which states any smooth manifold of dimension n may be embedded in $ \mathbb{R}^{2m}$ (we only prove a weaker version: namely that any compact smooth manifold of dimension $m$ may be embedded in $ \mathbb{R}^{2m+1}$).
- The Whitney Approximation Theorem, which states that a continuous map $ h \colon M \to N$ is homotopic to a smooth map $ \varphi \colon M \to N$. We will use this at the end of the semester to establish the homotopy invariance property of de Rham cohomology.
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