Short ropes and long knots (Q1599623)

The paper studies spaces of non-singular embeddings of a closed interval into \({\mathbb R}^3\). A rope is a non-singular \(C^1\)-smooth embedding \(r: [0,1] \to {\mathbb R}^3\) such that the end points \(0\) and \(1\) are sent to two fixed points \(A\) and \(B\), respectively. A rope is short if it is of length \(3\). The space of all ropes is endowed with the \(C^1\)-topology; for \(\varepsilon>0\), let \(B_\varepsilon\) be the subspace of ropes whose length is strictly less than \(1+\varepsilon\). Let \(K\) be the monoid of isotopy classes of knots in \(S^3\). The main results of the paper under review are: (1) For \(0<\varepsilon\leq 2\), there is a homomorphism from \(K\to \pi_1(B_\varepsilon)\) which is a group completion. (2) For \(\varepsilon>2\), the space \(B_\varepsilon\) is simply connected.