On planarity of compact, locally connected, metric spaces (Q654007)

\textit{S. Claytor} [``Topological immersion of peanian continua in a spherical surface,'' Ann.\ Math. (2) 35, 809--835 (1934; Zbl 0010.27602)] and \textit{C. Thomassen} [``The locally connected compact metric spaces embeddable in the plane,'' Combinatorica 24, No. 4, 699--718 (2004; Zbl 1070.05033)] independently generalized Kuratowski's classical theorem [\textit{C. Kuratowski}, ``Sur le problème des courbes gauches en topologie,'' Fundamenta 15, 271--283 (1930; JFM 56.1141.03)] on planar finite graphs, by proving that a 2-connected, compact, locally connected metric space is homeomorphic to a subset of the sphere if and only if it does not contain the complete graph \(K_5\) or the complete bipartite graph \(K_{3,3}\). The present paper is devoted to characterize planarity for a compact, locally connected metric space (without the assumption of 2-connectedness). The authors introduce a generalization of the thumbtack space (which consists of a closed unit disc in the plane, together with a line segment, one end of which is the center of the disc) and prove that ``generalized thumbtacks'' are the remaining forbidden structure for planarity in the connected case. As a consequence, they show that a compact, locally connected metric space is homeomorphic to a subset of the sphere if and only if it does not contain \(K_5\), \(K_{3,3}\), or any generalized thumbtack, or the disjoint union of a sphere and a point.