Sard's theorem

From Diffgeom
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Statement

Suppose M and N are differential manifolds and f:MN is a smooth map between them. Then, the set of regular values of f is a subset of measure zero in N.

Applications

Suppose M and N are differential manifolds, and the dimension of M is strictly less than the dimension of N. Then, if f:MN is a smooth map, the image f(M) has measure zero as a subset of N. In particular, f cannot be surjective.

This also shows that a differential manifold cannot be expressed as a union of the images of countably many smooth maps from differential manifolds of strictly smaller dimension