The van Kampen obstruction and its relatives

Abstract

We review a cochain-free treatment of the classical van Kampen obstruction θto embeddability of an n-polyhedron into R^{2n} and consider several analogues and generalizations of θ, including an extraordinary lift of θwhich in the manifold case has been studied by J.-P. Dax. The following results are obtained. - The mod 2 reduction of θis incomplete, which answers a question of Sarkaria. - An odd-dimensional analogue of θis a complete obstruction to linkless embeddability (="intrinsic unlinking") of the given n-polyhedron in R^{2n+1}. - A "blown up" 1-parameter version of θis a universal type 1 invariant of singular knots, i.e. knots in R^3 with a finite number of rigid transverse double points. We use it to decide in simple homological terms when a given integer-valued type 1 invariant of singular knots admits an integral arrow diagram (=Polyak-Viro) formula. - Settling a problem of Yashchenko in the metastable range, we obtain that every PL manifold N, non-embeddable in a given R^m, m\ge 3(n+1)/2, contains a subset X such that no map N\to R^m sends X and N-X to disjoint sets. - We elaborate on McCrory's analysis of the Zeeman spectral sequence to geometrically characterize "k-co-connected and locally k-co-connected" polyhedra, which we embed in R^{2n-k} for k<(n-3)/2 extending the Penrose-Whitehead-Zeeman theorem.

43 pages. v5: The statements of Lemma 4.1 and Theorem 4.2(b) are corrected. Minor corrections and additions elsewhere

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• Some Ramsey-type results on intrinsic linking of n-complexes
• Transverse fundamental group and projected embeddings
• On the Embeddability of Skeleta of Spheres
• d-Representability of simplicial complexes of fixed dimension
• Embeddings of homology equivalent manifolds with boundary
• Non-embeddability of geometric lattices and buildings
• Lifting maps between graphs to embeddings