Maps with Prescribed Boardman Singularities

Abstract

In this paper we extend Y. Eliashberg’s theorem on the maps with fold type singularities to arbitrary Thom-Boardman singularities. Namely, we state a necessary and sufficient condition for a continuous map of smooth manifolds of the same dimension to be homotopic to a generic map with a prescribed Thom-Boardman singularity ΣI at each point. In dimensions 2 and 3 we rephrase this condition in terms of the homology classes of the given singular loci and the characteristic classes of the manifolds.