Tight and Taut Submanifolds

Book excerpt: First published in 1997, this book contains six in-depth articles on various aspects of the field of tight and taut submanifolds and concludes with an extensive bibliography of the entire field. The book is dedicated to the memory of Nicolaas H. Kuiper; the first paper is an unfinished but insightful survey of the field of tight immersions and maps written by Kuiper himself. Other papers by leading researchers in the field treat topics such as the smooth and polyhedral portions of the theory of tight immersions, taut, Dupin and isoparametric submanifolds of Euclidean space, taut submanifolds of arbitrary complete Riemannian manifolds, and real hypersurfaces in complex space forms with special curvature properties. Taken together these articles provide a comprehensive survey of the field and point toward several directions for future research.