Maps of manifolds of the same dimension with prescribed Thom-Boardman singularities

In this paper we extend Y.Eliashberg's $h$-principle to arbitrary generic smooth maps of smooth manifolds. Namely, we prove 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 $\Sigma^I$ at each point and with no other critical points. In dimension 3 we rephrase these conditions in terms of the Stiefel-Whitney classes and the cohomology classes of the given loci of folds, cusps and swallowtail points.Comment: 28 pages. Some new corrections adde

Uniform convergence of Vapnik--Chervonenkis classes under ergodic sampling

We show that if $\mathcal{X}$ is a complete separable metric space and $\mathcal{C}$ is a countable family of Borel subsets of $\mathcal{X}$ with finite VC dimension, then, for every stationary ergodic process with values in $\mathcal{X}$, the relative frequencies of sets $C\in\mathcal{C}$ converge uniformly to their limiting probabilities. Beyond ergodicity, no assumptions are imposed on the sampling process, and no regularity conditions are imposed on the elements of $\mathcal{C}$. The result extends existing work of Vapnik and Chervonenkis, among others, who have studied uniform convergence for i.i.d. and strongly mixing processes. Our method of proof is new and direct: it does not rely on symmetrization techniques, probability inequalities or mixing conditions. The uniform convergence of relative frequencies for VC-major and VC-graph classes of functions under ergodic sampling is established as a corollary of the basic result for sets.Comment: Published in at http://dx.doi.org/10.1214/09-AOP511 the Annals of Probability (http://www.imstat.org/aop/) by the Institute of Mathematical Statistics (http://www.imstat.org