On the global isometric embedding of pseudo-Riemannian manifolds

Abstract

It is shown that any pseudo-Riemannian manifold has (in Nash’s sense) a proper isometric embedding into a pseudo-Euclidean space, which can be made to be of arbitrarily high differentiability. The application of this to the positive definite case treated by Nash gives a new proof using a Euclidean space of substantially lower dimension. The general result is applied to the space-time of relativity, and the dimensions and signatures of the spaces needed to embed various cases are evaluated.