Maps of manifolds into the plane which lift to standard embeddings in codimension two (Q5928484)

A map from a surface \(F\) to the plane is defined to have the ``standard lifting property'' (SLP) if all its liftings to 4-space which are embeddings have the following ``standard'' property: the image of the map in 4-space bounds a 3-dimensional handlebody. If the map from the surface to the plane only has the simplest possible singularities (folds) and a certain projection to a straight line only has 4 critical points, then the authors prove that the map has SLP. These conditions can be met by a sphere, a disjoint union of two spheres, a torus or a Klein bottle. It is also shown that the number 4 is sharp. Using connected sum operations the authors construct many maps with SLP. A high dimensional analogue of this problem is also considered: sufficient conditions are given for a generic map to have a similar standard lifting property in codimension two, when the source is an \(n\)-dimensional homotopy sphere and it is mapped to the plane. Here the conditions are as follows: the map can only have ``definite'' fold singularities and a projection to a straight line can only have 4 critical points.