Degrees of closed curves in the plane (Q1316322)

The Whitney-Graustein theorem states that two irregular closed curves in the plane are regularly homotopic if and only if their degrees are equal. The author's goal is to extend this theorem to a more general class of plane curves being isotopic in a more general sense. The closed curves under consideration are locally Jordan arcs, and the homotopies adjusted to this situation are assumed to be locally 1-1 and called gentle. The notion of degree can be extended to these curves, and the author's main result is that the Whitney-Graustein theorem also can be shown in this more general situation. Furthermore, if such a curve \(c\) satisfies some kind of topological transversality condition for its self-intersections, then it is shown that \(D(c) = 1 + \text{self}(c) \pmod 2,\) denoting by \(D(c)\) the degree of \(c\) and by \(\text{self}(c)\) the number of self- intersections of \(c\). The paper ends with some results on the distribution of tangent directions of non-stop differentiable closed locally 1-1 curves which are not necessarily continuously differentiable.