# Continuous maps between compact manifolds are homotopic to smooth ones

If $M_1$ and $M_2$ are compact connected manifolds of dimension $n$, and $f$ is a continuous map from $M_1$ to $M_2$, f is homotopic to a smooth map from $M_1$ to $M_2$.

Seems to be fairly basic, but I can't find a proof. It might be necessary to assume that the manifolds are Riemannian.

It should be possible to locally solve the problem in Euclidean space by possibly using polynomial approximations and then patching them up, where compactness would tell us that approximating the function in finitely many open sets is enough. I don't see how to use the compactness of the target space though.

• It is proved as Proposition 17.8 on page 213, in Bott, Tu, Differential Forms in Algebraic Topology – agtortorella Jul 29 '12 at 10:08

• Another reference in is M.W. Hirsch, Differential Topology, Chapter 5, Lemma 1.5, page 124. (Whitney's embedding theorem is also covered in detail in that book). I suppose any reasonably comprehensive text on differential topology should contain a proof of that result. Note that no compactness of either source or target manifold is needed and that one can approximate $f$ by smooth maps homotopic to it. – t.b. Aug 3 '12 at 10:04