Contractible open manifolds which embed in no compact, locally connected and locally 1-connected metric space (Q1983543)

The paper under review studies in detail some exotic 3-manifolds and their embedding properties. The famous \textit{Whitehead manifold} \(Wh^3\) has been the first example of a contractible open 3-manifold which is not homeomorphic to the Euclidean space \(\mathbb R^3\); but, on the other hand, it can be embedded in the 3-sphere \(S^3\). Later, the topologist R. H. Bing constructed a new similar manifold, also defined as an ascending union of embedded tori, but which does not embed neither in \(S^3\) nor in any compact 3-manifold. After that discovery, it has been proved that there are lots of such examples indeed. The first result of the present paper states that Bing's 3-manifold \(W\) cannot embed in any compact, locally connected and locally 1-connected 3-dimensional metric space. On the other hand, the same problem in high dimensions is less studied. The only attempt for constructing contractible open \(n\)-manifolds which admit no embedding in compact \(n\)-manifolds goes back to the PhD Thesis of R. Sternfeld in 1977. By means of the topology of covering spaces, he actually presented, for any \(n\), a contractible \(n\)-manifold which embeds in no compact \(n\)-manifold. The author of the paper under review firstly recovers this construction and then fixes an important error which occurs in the PhD Thesis. With all this, he is finally able to improve Sternfeld's result, by showing that in any dimension \(n\), there exists an open contractible \(n\)-manifold which embeds in no compact, locally connected and locally 1-connected metric space of dimension \(n\). In order to prove these results, the author makes a detailed analysis of the construction of Bing's manifold and of Sternfeld's dissertation.