Sphere eversion from the viewpoint of generic homotopy (Q526789)

More than sixty years ago \textit{S. Smale} [Trans. Am. Math. Soc. 90, 281--290 (1959; Zbl 0089.18102)] proved that any two immersions of \(S^2\) into \(\mathbb R^3\) are regularly homotopic. From this we conclude that it is possible to turn the 2-sphere in 3-space inside out by allowing intersections but no holes, rips, creases or pinches. Of course, visualization of such an eversion is attractive and there exist videos showing this. In this paper a new sphere eversion is constructed that starts from a generic homotopy of \(S^2\) to the plane \(\mathbb R^2\) and then lifting this generic homotopy to a generic regular homotopy of \(S^2\) to \(\mathbb R^3\). In order to obtain this lifting the authors have found necessary and sufficient conditions for existence of such a lifting. This way a sequence of contour generators gives a frame of a sequence of immersed spheres corresponding to sphere eversion. All is nicely illustrated by a series of pictures and the authors recommend to consider the web version of the article.