Connected sum at infinity and Cantrell-Stallings hyperplane unknotting (Q1945725)

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Connected sum at infinity and Cantrell-Stallings hyperplane unknotting
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    Connected sum at infinity and Cantrell-Stallings hyperplane unknotting (English)
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    9 April 2013
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    The work takes place in the category of metrizable separable spaces and treats all three classical manifold categories: topological (TOP), piecewise linear (PL) and differentiable (DIFF). CAT denotes either one of these manifold categories and a CAT statement is one that holds in all three manifold categories. Maps are assumed to be proper and CAT submanifolds are assumed to be properly embedded and CAT locally flat. An example of a CAT statement is the Cantrell-Stallings hyperplane unknotting theorem, from the title, which asserts unknotting of CAT embeddings of \(\mathbb R^{m-1}\) in \(\mathbb R^m\) with \(m\neq 3,\) and its new proof is in part the subject of the paper. An example in the TOP category is TOP unknotting of TOP codimension 1 spheres in all dimensions: Any locally flatly embedded \(S^{m-1}\) in \(S^m\) is the common frontier of a pair of embedded \(m\)-balls whose union is \(S^m.\) We have met operations among manifolds called connected sum and connected sum along boundaries. Naturally, connected sum along boundaries induces the connected sum operation of boundaries. The paper first treats the less familiar operation of the connected sum at infinity (CSI) (or end sum) and uses it to prove the mentioned Cantrell-Stallings hyperplane unknotting theorem. The operation is systematically introduced and its properties are proved: commutativity, associativity, composition and existence of the identity. The above classification treats one hyperplane of codimension 1 in \(\mathbb R^m\). The next subject of the paper treats the codimension 1 classification of CAT multiple component hyperplane embeddings into \(\mathbb R^m,\) \(m\neq3.\) A multiple component hyperplane in \(\mathbb R^m\) is a properly embedded sum of at most countably many disjoint hyperplanes each isomorphic to \(\mathbb R^{m-1}.\) The result says that these are classified by countable simplicial trees with one edge for each hyperplane. Of course, this classification statement involves additional assumptions that are all introduced in the paper and presented in detail. Beside the theorems described above, there are many byproducts of these considerations and alternative proofs. Reading the paper one also gets an overview of the CAT manifold theory during the 60s and 70s of the 20th century.
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    Schoenflies theorem
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    Cantrell-Stallings hyperplane unknotting
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    hyperplane linearization
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    connected sum at infinity
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    flange
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    Mittag-Leffler
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    derived limit
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    slab theorem
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