A new invariant and parametric connected sum of embeddings
We define an isotopy invariant of embeddings of manifolds into Euclidean space. This invariant together with the α-invariant of Haefliger-Wu is complete in the dimension range where the α-invariant could be incomplete. We also define parametric connected sum of certain embeddings (analogous to surgery). This allows us to obtain new completeness results for the α-invariant and the following estimation of isotopy classes of embeddings. In the piecewise-linear category, for a (3n-2m+2)-connected...