Linking spheres
D. B. A. Epstein · Mathematical Proceedings of the Cambridge Philosophical Society · 1960
Andrews and Curtis have shown (1) that one can embed two Sn's in En+2 for n = 2, in such a way that one sphere cannot be shrunk to a point in the residue space of the other. In this paper the result is shown to be true for any n ≥ 1. (The result is obvious for n = 1.) The method is to calculate the appropriate homotopy group of the residue space of one sphere, and to show that the embedding of the other sphere represents a non-zero element of the group. The two spheres can both be embedded analytically.