Isometric deformations of compact hypersurfaces (Q677645)

In 1955 N. Kuiper and J. Nash proved that given an embedding \(F\) of a Riemannian \(n\)-manifold \((M,g)\) in \(F^{n+1}\) which is short in the sense that the metric induced by \(F\) is less than \(g\), there is a \(C^1\) isometric embedding which is arbitrarily \(C^0\)-close to \(F\). Here for compact \(M\) the Nash-Kuiper result is extended to deformations, that is to families of short embeddings. The desired change of the hypersurfaces is achievable by locally stretching them in one direction and corrugating by sine waves of high frequency and small amplitude. Furthermore, it is shown that a convex hypersurface which is flat in a certain global sense (e.g., an oblate rotational ellipsoid in \(E^3\) with axis ratio more than \(\sqrt{8/3})\) admits an isometric deformation through \(C^1\) embeddings which increases the enclosed volume.