A hierarchy for closed \(n\)-cell complements (Q680332)
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English | A hierarchy for closed \(n\)-cell complements |
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A hierarchy for closed \(n\)-cell complements (English)
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23 January 2018
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The (technical) paper under review deals with wild embeddings of spheres and with a sort of classification of their wildness. Recall that a \textit{crumpled cube} is a space that is homeomorphic to the closure of the interior of a 2-sphere in \(\mathbb R^3\) (or, equivalently, such that it is homeomorphic to the union of a 2-sphere and its interior in \(\mathbb R^3\)). There are several examples of \textit{wild} crumpled cubes (i.e. different from a 3-cell), such as for example the famous solid Alexander horned sphere (a very particular embedding of a sphere in the 3-dimensional Euclidean space), and the related Antoine's horned sphere. The authors' aim is to try to measure and compare the wildness of crumpled \(n\)-cubes, and to better organize the set of wildly embedded objects by introducing some orders. Let \(C, D\) be two crumbled \(n\)-cubes, and \(h\) a homeomorphism from the boundary of \(C\) to that of \(D\). The set \(\mathcal W_n\) is the set of triples \((C,D,h)\) such that there exists an associated map \(f_h: C \to D\) which extends \(h\) and such that the preimage of the boundary of \(D\) is exactly the boundary of \(C\). In simple terms, whenever there exists \(h\) such that the triple \((C,D,h)\) belongs to \(\mathcal W_n\), then \(C\) should be thought of as a crumpled \(n\)-cube that is \textit{at least as wild as} \(D\). On the other hand, if \((C,D,h) \in \mathcal W_n\), but there is no homeomorphism \(h'\) from the boundary of \(D\) to that of \(C\) for which \((D,C,h')\) belongs to \(\mathcal W_n\), then \(C\) is said to be \textit{strictly wilder than} \(D\). The authors study these two definitions and furnish several results concerning this measure of wildness. Also, they show that the definition of ``at least as wild as'' does not provide a partial order on the collection of crumpled \(n\)-cubes, by presenting an example of a pair of topologically distinct crumpled \(n\)-cubes, each at least as wild as the other. However, ``strictly wilder than'' is a strict partial order on the set of all crumpled \(n\)-cubes, up to homeomorphism, and the authors are able to prove that every non-trivial crumpled \(n\)-cube is strictly wilder than the \(n\)-cell \(B^n\).
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crumpled \(n\)-cube
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closed \(n\)-cell complement
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locally collared
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