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Bing’s wild involution | Geometry and the imagination

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An embedded circle separates the sphere into two connected components; this is the Jordan curve theorem. A strengthening of this fact, called the Jordan-Schoenflies theorem, says that the two components are disks; i.e. every embedded circle in the sphere bounds a disk on both sides. One dimension higher, Alexander proved that every smoothly embedded 2-sphere in the 3-sphere bounds a ball on both sides. However the hypothesis of smoothness cannot be removed; in two three-page papers which appeared successively in the same volume of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Science, Alexander proved his theorem, and gave an example of a topological sphere that does not bound a ball on one side (a modified version bounds a ball on neither side). This counterexample is usually called the Alexander Horned Sphere; the `bad’ side is called a crumpled cube. For a picture of Alexander’s sphere, see this post (the `bad’ side is the outside in the figure). The horned sphere is wild; it has a Can

Bing’s wild involution | Geometry and the imagination Geometry and the imagination Skip to content Home About ← Stiefel-Whitney cycles as intersections Bing’s wild involution Posted on April 8, 2017 by Danny Calegari An embedded circle separates the sphere into two connected components; this is the Jordan curve theorem. A strengthening of this fact, called the Jordan-Schoenflies theorem, says that the two components are disks; i.e. every embedded circle in the sphere bounds a disk on both sides. One dimension higher, Alexander proved that every smoothly embedded 2-sphere in th

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