In mathematics, the Whitehead manifold is an open 3-manifold that is contractible, but not homeomorphic to J. H. C. Whitehead (1935) discovered this puzzling object while he was trying to prove the Poincaré conjecture, correcting an error in an earlier paper Whitehead (1934, theorem 3) where he incorrectly claimed that no such manifold exists.
A contractible manifold is one that can continuously be shrunk to a point inside the manifold itself. For example, an open ball is a contractible manifold. All manifolds homeomorphic to the ball are contractible, too. One can ask whether all contractible manifolds are homeomorphic to a ball. For dimensions 1 and 2, the answer is classical and it is "yes". In dimension 2, it follows, for example, from the Riemann mapping theorem. Dimension 3 presents the first counterexample: the Whitehead manifold.[1]
^Gabai, David (2011). "The Whitehead manifold is a union of two Euclidean spaces". Journal of Topology. 4 (3): 529–534. doi:10.1112/jtopol/jtr010.
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the Whiteheadmanifold is an open 3-manifold that is contractible, but not homeomorphic to R 3 . {\displaystyle \mathbb {R} ^{3}.} J. H. C. Whitehead (1935)...
torus Whiteheadmanifold Meyerhoff manifold Weeks manifold For more examples see 3-manifold. Complex projective plane Del Pezzo surface E8 manifold Enriques...
now-named Whiteheadmanifold, which refuted his previous purported proof of the conjecture. Wikimedia Commons has media related to Whitehead links. Solomon's...
is contractible, as is any star domain on a Euclidean space. The Whiteheadmanifold is contractible. Spheres of any finite dimension are not contractible...
homeomorphic to a compact manifold with a closed subset of the boundary removed. The Whiteheadmanifold is an example of a contractible manifold that is not tame...
manifolds Knot complements Whiteheadmanifold Invariants Fundamental group Heegaard genus tri-genus Analytic torsion Orientable manifold Connected sum Jordan-Schönflies...
mathematician J. H. C. Whitehead. The Whitehead torsion is important in applying surgery theory to non-simply connected manifolds of dimension > 4: for...
theory. Smooth manifolds have canonical PL structures — they are uniquely triangulizable, by Whitehead's theorem on triangulation (Whitehead 1940) — but...
manifold − A Hausdorff 2-dimensional real analytic manifold that is not paracompact. Real projective line Torus 3-torus Solid torus Unknot Whitehead manifold...
collapsed, no matter how bad the small subspace is. The Whiteheadmanifold is an example of a 3-manifold that is contractible but not simply connected at infinity...
of a simplicial complex or PL-manifold A, equal to Wh(π1(A)); see Whitehead torsion. All named after J. H. C. Whitehead. This disambiguation page lists...
PDiff). That every smooth (indeed, C1) manifold has a unique PL structure was originally proven in (Whitehead 1940). A detailed expositionary proof is...
not a manifold, it is a generalized homological manifold and a homotopy manifold. List of topologies Whiteheadmanifold, a contractible 3-manifold not homeomorphic...
cubic. The cusped hyperbolic 3-manifold obtained by (5, 1) Dehn surgery on the Whitehead link is the so-called sibling manifold, or sister, of the figure-eight...
smooth manifolds via de Rham cohomology, or Čech or sheaf cohomology to investigate the solvability of differential equations defined on the manifold in question...
timeline of manifolds, one of the major geometric concepts of mathematics. For further background see history of manifolds and varieties. Manifolds in contemporary...
for symplectic manifolds satisfying only this weaker condition to be called "weakly exact." Acyclic space Essential manifoldWhitehead conjecture Gompf...
subspace X in Euclidean space, a sphere, or other manifold. It is generalized by Spanier–Whitehead duality. Let X {\displaystyle X} be a compact, locally...
2. Butler on Whitehead, Edited by Roland Faber, Michael Halewood, and Deena Lin (2012). ISBN 978-0-7391-7276-6 # 3. The Divine Manifold, Roland Faber...
structure space of the corresponding manifold. s-cobordism theorem h-cobordism theorem Whitehead torsion Dehn surgery Manifold decomposition Orientation character...
his work on the topology of smooth (differentiable) four-dimensional manifolds, Donaldson–Thomas theory, and his contributions to Kähler geometry. He...
a more delicate invariant. Whitehead torsion provides a key tool for the study of combinatorial or differentiable manifolds with nontrivial fundamental...