Universality of Euler flows and flexibility of Reeb embeddings

Abstract

The dynamics of an inviscid and incompressible fluid flow on a Riemannian manifold is governed by the Euler equations. Recently, Tao [38,39] launched a programme to address the global existence problem for the Euler and Navier Stokes equations based on the concept of universality. Inspired by this proposal, in this article we prove that the stationary Euler equations exhibit several universality features. More precisely, we show that any non-autonomous flow on a compact manifold can be extended to a smooth stationary solution of the Euler equations on some Riemannian manifold of possibly higher dimension. The solutions we construct are of Beltrami type, and being stationary they exist for all time. Using this result, we establish the Turing completeness of the steady Euler flows, i.e., there exist solutions that encode a universal Turing machine and, in particular, these solutions have undecidable trajectories. Our proofs deepen the correspondence between contact topology and hydrodynamics, which is key to establish the universality of the Reeb flows and their Beltrami counterparts. An essential ingredient in the proofs, of interest in itself, is a novel flexibility theorem for embeddings in Reeb dynamics in terms of an h-principle in contact geometry, which unveils the flexible behavior of the steady Euler flows. These results can be viewed as lending support to the intuition that solutions to the Euler equations can be extremely complicated in nature. © 2023 The Authors