Also, which immersion of $S^2$ did you talk about above? I gave two embeddings of $S^2$, one orientation preserving and the other reversing, and gave something which intuitively looked like an isotopy.
One thing I still need to learn is to not use chat as a crutch and only present a question after it hasn't been resolved with a good amount of time and testing...
But it's so tempting to just ask and not use my brain!
@AkivaWeinberger Well, it's a little bit tougher than that. What you really do is pick a triangulation of $S^2 \times [0,1]$, on each simplex of which the map is linear.
You would need to show that you can pick the triangulation to be the standard triangulation of $S^2 \times [0,1]$, where $S^2$ is given some specified polyhedral structure.
Then your dihedral angles not going to zero is the same thing as saying that the map is locally injective.
@MikeMiller Good point on the tubular neighborhood thing. I have never actually had a pictorially transparent immersion of RP^2 in R^3. In any case that fails even for the standard embedding of the Klein bottle in R^3 I guess. If you try to thicken up the "outside", it'll invariably hit the thickening of the inside.
Good point (even though you removed it). The mapping from the normal bundle isn't an embedding, but the image is an embedded submanifold with boundary.
I'm so used to the topological "not the union of two nonempty disjoint open sets" but Rudin uses a little more than that--two nonempty sets $A,B$ are separated iff $A \cap \overline{B} = \overline{A} \cap B = \emptyset$, and then a connected set is one which is not the union of two separated sets.
@Ted: His deleted point was unfortunately not good. If the tubular neighborhood is small enough (small enough that sections are still immersed) the figure 8 cannot give rise to an embedded circle that way.
not sure if this is a stupid question but ive been doing trigonometry using the sin cos tan functions but what exactly do the functions do ? say i had sin(20) and wrote it as f(x) = ? what is it actually doing on my calculator?
why do schools teach us these functions but never going into what they do ? is it just really complicated... one of the few things where we learn to essentially take them for granted
@TedShifrin You should be able to find immersions that are not embeddings but boundaries of tubular neighborhoods are. For instance, push the top and bottom of a sphere into the center.
@TedShifrin how many hours did you absolutly have to spent on math to understand it at university? and how many hours did ou actually spent? (per week)
@DHMO I realized the dumbness in my statement last (or the other) night in defining $\omega^\omega$. While it is the lim sup of the sequence $\{\omega, \omega^2, \omega^3,\ldots\}$ I obviously did not include every preceding ordinal to establish an identity
@DHMO I think $\omega^\omega :=$ $\{0,1,\ldots ; \omega, \omega+1,\ldots $ $;\omega\cdot 2, \omega\cdot 2 +1,\ldots ; \omega ^2, \omega^2 + 1,\ldots\}$ is the one. I mean to include all $\omega ^ p \cdot m + n$