Alexander's trick

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Alexander's trick, also known as the Alexander trick, is a basic result in geometric topology, named after J. W. Alexander.

[edit] Statement

Two homeomorphisms of the n-dimensional ball $D n$ which agree on the boundary sphere $S n - 1$ , are isotopic.

More generally, two homeomorphisms of Dⁿ that are isotopic on the boundary, are isotopic.

[edit] Proof

Base case: every homeomorphism which fixes the boundary is isotopic to the identity relative to the boundary.

If $f\colon D^n \to D^n$ satisfies $f(x) = x \mbox{ for all } x \in S^{n-1}$ , then an isotopy connecting f to the identity is given by

$J(x,t) = \begin{cases} tf(x/t), & \mbox{if } 0 \leq \|x\| < t, \\ x, & \mbox{if } t \leq \|x\| \leq 1. \end{cases}$

Visually, you straighten it out from the boundary, squeezing $f$ down to the origin. William Thurston calls this "combing all the tangles to one point".

The subtlety is that at $t = 0$ , $f$ "disappears": the germ at the origin "jumps" from an infinitely stretched version of $f$ to the identity. Each of the steps in the homotopy could be smoothed (smooth the transition), but the homotopy (the overall map) has a singularity at $(x, t) = (0,0)$ . This underlines that the Alexander trick is a PL construction, but not smooth.

General case: isotopic on boundary implies isotopic

Now if $f,g\colon D^n \to D^n$ are two homeomorphisms that agree on $S n - 1$ , then $g - 1 f$ is the identity on $S n - 1$ , so we have an isotopy $J$ from the identity to $g - 1 f$ . The map $g J$ is then an isotopy from $g$ to $f$ .

[edit] Radial extension

Some authors use the term Alexander trick for the statement that every homeomorphism of $S n - 1$ can be extended to a homeomorphism of the entire ball $D n$ .

However, this is much easier to prove than the result discussed above: it is called radial extension (or coning) and is also true piecewise-linearly, but not smoothly.

Concretely, let $f\colon S^{n-1} \to S^{n-1}$ be a homeomorphism, then