Kuratowski complexes (Q2640946)

The aim of the paper is a generalization of the classical Kuratowski criterion about the planarity of graphs and of the van Kampen-Flores theorem. The main theorem gives equivalent conditions for an n- dimensional simplicial complex K to be critically non-embeddable into \({\mathbb{R}}^{2n}\). The definition of ``critically non-embeddable'' roughly means that it is almost embeddable with only one double-point. These equivalent conditions involve the so-called deleted join \(K_*\) which is the subcomplex of the ordinary join of two copies of K which consists of the join of all pairs of disjoint simplices of K. There are a finite number of combinatorially distinct critically non-embeddable complexes, and this number is essentially a number of partitions of \(n+1\).