Timeline for Why/does 'low-dimension' topology end with dimension 4?
Current License: CC BY-SA 4.0
4 events
| when toggle format | what | by | license | comment | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Apr 30 at 7:38 | vote | accept | Troubled Shallows | ||
| Apr 30 at 7:38 | |||||
| Apr 30 at 0:47 | comment | added | Ryan Budney | Not purely h-cobordism, but the h-cobordism theorem is the beginning of a body of work including what gets called "surgery theory", s-cobordism, k-theory, smoothing theory, and so on. With only a few exceptions this body of work is coherent in dimensions $n \geq 5$, like the Whitney trick. | |
| Apr 29 at 19:17 | comment | added | xuq01 | Ah, I recall seeing somewhere the notion that difficulties in high-dimensional topology are often explicitly homotopy-theoretic in nature. I'd assume that it would be a consequence of the h-cobordism theorem? | |
| Apr 29 at 14:48 | history | answered | Ryan Budney | CC BY-SA 4.0 |