Holomorphic embeddings and immersions of Stein manifolds: a survey

Abstract

In this paper we survey results on the existence of holomorphic embeddings and immersions of Stein manifolds into complex manifolds. Most results pertain to proper maps into Stein manifolds. We include a new result saying that every continuous map $X\to Y$ between Stein manifolds is homotopic to a proper holomorphic embedding provided that $\mathrm{dim} Y > 2\mathrm{dim}\, X$ and we allow a homotopic deformation of the Stein structure on $X$.