Approximation and homotopy in regulous geometry

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Let $X$ , $Y$ be nonsingular real algebraic sets. A map $\varphi \colon X \to Y$ is said to be $k$ -regulous, where $k$ is a nonnegative integer, if it is of class $\mathcal {C}^k$ and the restriction of $\varphi$ to some Zariski open dense subset of $X$ is a regular map. Assuming that $Y$ is uniformly rational, and $k \geq 1$ , we prove that a $\mathcal {C}^{\infty }$ map $f \colon X \to Y$ can be approximated by $k$ -regulous maps in the $\mathcal {C}^k$ topology if and only if $f$ is homotopic to a $k$ -regulous map. The class of uniformly rational real algebraic varieties includes spheres, Grassmannians and rational nonsingular surfaces, and is stable under blowing up nonsingular centers. Furthermore, taking $Y=\mathbb {S}^p$ (the unit $p$ -dimensional sphere), we obtain several new results on approximation of $\mathcal {C}^{\infty }$ maps from $X$ into $\mathbb {S}^p$ by $k$ -regulous maps in the $\mathcal {C}^k$ topology, for $k \geq 0$ .