Whitney regularity of the image of the Chevalley mapping

Abstract

A compact set K ⊂ ℝn is Whitney 1-regular if the geodesic distance in K is equivalent to the Euclidean distance. Let P be the Chevalley map defined by an integrity basis of the algebra of polynomials invariant by a reflection group. This paper gives the Whitney 1-regularity of the image by P of any closed ball centred at the origin. The proof uses the works of Givental', Kostov and Arnol'd on the symmetric group. It needs a generalization of a property of the Vandermonde determinants to the Jacobian of the Chevalley mappings.