Totally skew embeddings of manifolds (Q2471023): Difference between revisions

A pair of lines in Euclidean space is said to be skew if they are not parallel and do not intersect. The submanifold \(M^n\) in \(\mathbb R^N\) is said to be totally skew if every pair of tangent lines of \(M\) are skew, unless they are tangent to \(M\) at the same point. The main question is: given a manifold \(M^n\), what is the smallest dimension \(N(M^n)\) such that \(M^n\) admits a totally skew embedding in \(\mathbb R^N\)? For example the following basic bound was obtained. Theorem 1.1. For any manifold \(M^n\), \(2n+ 1\leq N(M^n)\leq 4n+ 1\). The existence of non-singular bilinear maps and the immersion problem for the real projective spaces are also considered. Corollary 1.8. \(\mathbb R P^{n-1}\) can be immersed in \(\mathbb R^{N(n)-n-1}\).