Why does the Nash-Kuiper theorem imply that Riemannian manifolds can be isometrically embedded into arbitrarly small neighborhoods of Euclidean space

differential-geometrymanifoldsriemannian-geometry

There's a sentence in the Wikipedia page for the Nash-Kuiper theorem that I don't understand:

In particular, as follows from the Whitney embedding theorem, any $𝑚$-dimensional Riemannian manifold admits an isometric $\mathcal{C}^1$-embedding into an arbitrarily small neighborhood in $2m$-dimensional Euclidean space.

This claim doesn't seem to follow from either the strong or the weak version of the Whitney embedding theorem (WET). The strong version of the WET only applies to embeddings into all of $\mathbb{R}^{2m}$, not into small neighborhoods of $\mathbb{R}^{2m}$. And the weak version only applies to embeddings into manifolds of dimension greater than $2m$. So neither version seems to apply here.

Is the quoted claim above using the strong or the weak version of the WET, and how?

Best Answer

By Whitney theorem you have an embeding, say $\phi_0$. Shrink it in the form $\phi = \mu \circ \phi_0$ for $\mu : \mathbb R^n \to \mathbb R^n$, so that the following holds :

  1. $\phi$ has values in a ball of radius $\varepsilon$

  2. $\phi$ is a short immersion

By Nash theorem you then have an approximating isometric embeding $\psi$ such that $\vert \psi - \phi \vert < \varepsilon $.

Then $\psi$ lies in a ball of radius $2 \varepsilon$.

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