Decompositions of Manifolds

A topological embedding is a homeomorphism of one space onto a subspace of another. The book analyzes how and when objects like polyhedra or manifolds embed in a given higher-dimensional manifold. The main problem is to determine when two topological embeddings of the same object are equivalent in the sense of differing only by a homeomorphism of the ambient manifold. Knot theory is the special case of spheres smoothly embedded in spheres; in this book, much more general spaces and much more general embeddings are considered. A key aspect of the main problem is taming: when is a topological embedding of a polyhedron equivalent to a piecewise linear embedding? A central theme of the book is the fundamental role played by local homotopy properties of the complement in answering this taming question. The book begins with a fresh description of the various classic examples of wild embeddings (i.e., embeddings inequivalent to piecewise linear embeddings). Engulfing, the fundamental tool of the subject, is developed next. After that, the study of embeddings is organized by codimension (the difference between the ambient dimension and the dimension of the embedded space). In all codimensions greater than two, topological embeddings of compacta are approximated by nicer embeddings, nice embeddings of polyhedra are tamed, topological embeddings of polyhedra are approximated by piecewise linear embeddings, and piecewise linear embeddings are locally unknotted. Complete details of the codimension-three proofs, including the requisite piecewise linear tools, are provided. The treatment of codimension-two embeddings includes a self-contained, elementary exposition of the algebraic invariants needed to construct counterexamples to the approximation and existence of embeddings. The treatment of codimension-one embeddings includes the locally flat approximation theorem for manifolds as well as the characterization of local flatness in terms of local homotopy properties.

Recent success with the four-dimensional Poincaré conjecture has revived interest in low-dimensional topology, especially the three-dimensional Poincaré conjecture and other aspects of the problems of classifying three-dimensional manifolds. These problems have a driving force, and have generated a great body of research, as well as insight.The main topics treated in this book include a paper by V Poenaru on the Poincaré conjecture and its ramifications, giving an insight into the herculean work of the author on the subject. Steve Armentrout's paper on “Bing's dogbone space” belongs to the topics in three-dimensional topology motivated by the Poincaré conjecture. S Singh gives a nice synthesis of Armentrout's work. Also included in the volume are shorter original papers, dealing with somewhat different aspects of geometry, and dedicated to Armentrout by his colleagues — Augustin Banyaga (and Jean-Pierre Ezin), David Hurtubise, Hossein Movahedi-Lankarani and Robert Wells.

Covers the proceedings of the Summer Research Conference on 4-manifolds held at Durham, New Hampshire, July 1982, under the auspices of the American Mathematical Society and National Science Foundation.

During the summer of 1965, an informal seminar in geometric topology was held at the University of Wisconsin under the direction of Professor Bing. Twenty-five of these lectures are included in this study, among them Professor Bing's lecture describing the recent attacks of Haken and Poincaré on the Poincaré conjectures, and sketching a proof of Haken's main result.