Isometric immersion 2026-10-05
An isometric immersion is an immersion between Riemannian manifolds whose derivative preserves the inner products of tangent vectors; equivalently, . Its derivative is injective and the target may have larger dimension. A local isometry additionally requires a local diffeomorphism, so its tangent maps are linear isomorphisms. For example, a sphere with its induced Riemannian metric is isometrically immersed in Euclidean space, although its positive intrinsic sectional curvature differs from that of the ambient space.
Local isometry Created 2026-09-24 Updated 2026-10-05
A local isometry between Riemannian manifolds is a local diffeomorphism with . Equivalently, its differentials are isometric linear isomorphisms between tangent spaces. It preserves the Levi-Civita connection, intrinsic sectional curvature, and affinely parametrized geodesics. A map whose differentials are merely isometric injections is an isometric immersion; the local diffeomorphism requirement distinguishes these notions.
A quadratic form on a finite-dimensional real vector space is a function for a symmetric bilinear form . Conversely recovers that bilinear form. Two quadratic forms are congruent if a linear isomorphism satisfies ; in coordinates this is matrix congruence, , with invertible.
Sylvester's law of inertia says that a real quadratic form admits coordinates in which
and the numbers of positive, negative and zero squares, , are independent of the coordinates. Here ; and are the maximal dimensions of subspaces on which the quadratic form is positive definite and negative definite, while is the dimension of its radical of a bilinear form. These numbers are the inertia of a bilinear form. The rank of a quadratic form is , and the signature of a quadratic form, in the signed-difference convention, is .
Completing squares gives
The change of coordinates is invertible, so the inertia is and the signature is . If signature is recorded as an ordered pair instead, that pair is .
True. Use the lifted basis above and put . If , applying gives , so all . Thus the form a basis of , and takes this basis to the basis of . It is a linear isomorphism.
In fact the right inverse gives the stronger splitting
For every , write ; the first term is in the kernel and the second in . Their intersection is zero because is injective. This is a direct sum decomposition.
A smooth real vector bundle of vector bundle rank consists of a smooth manifold , a smooth projection , real vector space structures on its fibers, and local vector bundle trivializations
that commute with projection to and are linear isomorphisms on each fiber. On overlaps the change of trivialization is , with smooth into the general linear group. The usual smooth manifold convention is Hausdorff and second countable.
For an -dimensional , take the disjoint union of its tangent spaces. A manifold chart supplies
If is another chart, the resulting change of coordinates on the total space is
This is smooth, its inverse is the same construction with exchanged, and the fiber map is invertible and linear. Thus these charts define a smooth structure with the required bundle trivializations.
For completeness, the topology so constructed is Hausdorff: different base points can be separated downstairs, while vectors over one point can be separated inside one product chart. A countable base atlas for and countable bases for its products with give second countability. Hence the total space is genuinely a smooth manifold, not just a collection of fibers. We obtain
The fibers must retain their base labels. In particular, a literal untagged union of fibers in is not sufficient when is not injective. Use the pullback vector bundle
This makes precise the indexed-union notation in the PDF. For a vector bundle trivialization , define
It is a fiberwise linear isomorphism, with inverse . The transition functions are , hence smooth. They satisfy the same cocycle identities as those of and give a smooth total space of manifold dimension .
One may also see that this is an embedded submanifold of : in a bundle chart the constraint is the graph of the smooth map in the base coordinates, leaving the fiber coordinates free. Thus the chart construction agrees with its natural subspace smooth structure. No immersion or surjectivity hypothesis on is required. Therefore
A vector bundle morphism over is a smooth map with whose restriction is linear for every . A vector bundle isomorphism is such a map with a smooth bundle-morphism inverse. Equivalently, a fiberwise bijective smooth bundle morphism is an isomorphism: in local vector bundle trivializations it is multiplication by an invertible smooth matrix, and its inverse matrix is smooth.
For a diffeomorphism , define
The derivative is a linear isomorphism by the chain rule, since . In manifold charts, is represented by the smooth Jacobian matrix of , so it is a smooth bundle morphism. Its inverse is
which is also smooth and fiberwise linear. Consequently
This identifies the bundles over the same base ; the tangent map by itself is a map from to covering .
There is an orientation convention in this statement: the two volume forms must be positive for one fixed orientation, as is usual in Moser theorem for volume forms. Without that convention, the stated necessity is false. For example, on an oriented two-sphere, take a positive volume form and an orientation-reversing diffeomorphism , and set . Then but . We prove the intended result with a common orientation.
If , positivity forces to preserve the orientation, and integration of the pullback of a differential form gives equality of the integrals.
For sufficiency, top-degree de Rham cohomology gives a differential form of degree with . Put . Positivity makes every a volume form. The interior product of a differential form gives an linear isomorphism
Thus there is a unique smooth time-dependent vector field satisfying . Since is compact, its local flow exists throughout and defines a smooth isotopy starting at the identity. By Cartan's magic formula, and since a top-degree differential form has zero exterior derivative,
Hence
The zero-dimensional case, a single point, is immediate from equality of the integrals.
Use the decomposition into Lagrangian subspaces from part (a). The bilinear form pairs and nondegenerately: a vector in either summand annihilating the other already annihilates its own summand and hence all of , so is zero.
Choose a basis of . The linear map
is an linear isomorphism. Let correspond to the dual basis of the . Then , and the pairings within each summand vanish. Thus
Assume . Then
Set , choose a direct-sum complement such that , and choose a complement such that .
The restriction is injective because , and it is surjective because every image equals after decomposing . It is therefore a isomorphism, so and . Also . Hence
has all the required properties.
An invariant bilinear form defines a linear map
Invariance gives
so is an -homomorphism. Its kernel is a -subrepresentation of irreducible . Hence either , so , or is injective and therefore a linear isomorphism . In the latter case is a nondegenerate.
If and are two nonzero invariant forms, then
By Schur lemma, this endomorphism is scalar, so . Cases involving the zero form are immediate. Thus any two invariant bilinear forms are proportional.
A Schauder basis of a real Banach space is a sequence for which every has a unique norm-convergent expansion . Its basis projection is
and its basis constant is .
For the sequence space in the question, define
Convergence in the definition of makes well defined, and uniqueness of basis coefficients makes it a linear bijection. Moreover,
whereas
Thus is an isomorphism and, in particular, the displayed supremum really is a complete norm on .
The coordinate functional of a Schauder basis is
It is bounded because . On finite linear combinations of the , the nth partial-sum operator is the restriction of , since
The operators have norms at most , so the standard basis criterion shows that the dual sequence of a Schauder basis is a basic sequence in . For every and ,
which is precisely in the weak-star topology.
Suppose now that is a reflexive Banach space. If did not tend to zero, approximation by finite basis blocks would give a bounded block sequence and an such that . Reflexivity gives a weakly convergent subsequence. Every fixed coordinate functional is eventually zero on a block sequence, so its weak limit has every basis coordinate zero and is therefore zero. This contradicts . Hence in norm for every , so the basis is shrinking and is a basis of .
The converse fails. The standard basis of is shrinking because its dual sequence is the standard basis of , but is not reflexive.
Finally assume is a basis of . Map to
For ,
so . Conversely, if and , define
The limit exists: for ,
because is a basis. Also , so and . These two constructions are inverse and satisfy
Thus and are isomorphic.
On a compact connected oriented -dimensional smooth manifold without boundary, integration is a linear isomorphism . Thus two top-degree differential forms have the same de Rham cohomology class exactly when their integrals agree.