Every tight immersion in three-space of the projective plane with one handle is asymmetric. (Q1880139)

An immersion (or a map) \(f:M \to \mathbb{R}^3\) of a surface \(M\) into Euclidean 3-space is said to be tight (or has the two-piece property) provided that the preimage of every half-space of \(\mathbb{R}^3\) is connected in \(M\). The Klein bottle and the projective plane admit no tight immersions, while the projective plane with one handle does not admit smooth ones but admits a polyhedral one. This last result is due to the present author in his paper [ibid. 196, 113--122 (2000; Zbl 1045.57010)]. In this paper the author asks whether there is a symmeteric tight immersion of the projective plane with one handle, giving a negative answer. A positive result is that every orientable, and every non-orientable surface with Euler characteristic less than \(-1\) has a symmetric tight immersion. So all surfaces but the Klein bottle, the projective plane and the projective plane with one handle have symmetric tight immersions.