We have decided to discontinue the publication of preprints on our preprint server as of 1 March 2024. The publication culture within mathematics has changed so much due to the rise of repositories such as ArXiV (www.arxiv.org) that we are encouraging all institute members to make their preprints available there. An institute's repository in its previous form is, therefore, unnecessary. The preprints published to date will remain available here, but we will not add any new preprints here.
MiS Preprint
4/2004
Regularity properties of isometric immersions
Stefan Müller and Mohammed Reza Pakzad
Abstract
We show that an isometric immersion $y$ from a two-dimensional domain $S$ with $C^{1, \alpha}$ boundary to $\mathbb{R}^3$ which belongs to the critical Sobolev space $W^{2,2}$ is $C^1$ up to the boundary. More generally $C^1$ regularity up to the boundary holds for all scalar functions $V \in W^{2,2}(S)$ which satisfy $\det \nabla^2 V = 0$. If $S$ has only Lipschitz boundary we show such $V$ can be approximated in $W^{2,2}$ by functions $V_k \in W^{1, \infty} \cap W^{2,2}$ with $\det \nabla^2 V_k = 0$.