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Aaron S
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Intuition behind Alexander duality

I was wondering if anyone could offer some intuition for why Alexander duality holds. Of course, the proof is easy enough to check, and it is also easy to work out many examples by hand. However, I don't have any feeling for why it is true.

To give you an example of what I am looking for, when I think of Poincare duality I think of the picture in terms of triangulations and dual triangulations. Is there any picture like that for Alexander duality? Is there at least maybe some kind of obvious bilinear pairing between the two sides of it or something?

Aaron S
  • 361
  • 4
  • 4