Past exam of the mathematics course of the University of Cambridge 2010 iii Paper 17 1 b Solution Created 2026-10-03 Updated 2026-10-14
Write a point of the larger sphere as . In the complement, . There is a homeomorphismwhose inverse sends to . In particular the complement has a deformation retraction onto its transverse sphere. Explicitly,The denominator stays positive, the homotopy stays in the complement, and points with remain fixed. This establishes the homology of an equatorial sphere complement. By homotopy invariance of homology, its homology is therefore the homology of a sphere of dimension :In the codimension-one case, the complement has two contractible components; this is why degree-zero homology has rank two. Equivalently, in every case its only nonzero reduced homology is .