Past exam of the Probability, statistics and options II course of the University of Oxford / 2008 / F / 2 / a / Solution

A two-dimensional embedded submanifold is a subset which near every point can be straightened by a smooth local coordinate change in the ambient space to an open piece of the coordinate plane ${\mathbb{R}}^2\times \{0\}$. Equivalently locally it has a regular smooth parametrization of rank two, with the induced local topology.

A tangent vector at $x$ is the derivative ${\gamma }^{\prime }(0)$ of a smooth curve in the submanifold with $\gamma (0)=x$. These derivatives form the two-dimensional tangent space $T_{x}M$. A normal vector is a vector orthogonal to every tangent vector. Its space is $(T_{x}M{)}^{\perp }$, which has $\boxed{\dim (T_{x}M{)}^{\perp }=1}$ in the three-dimensional ambient Euclidean space.