High Quality Content by WIKIPEDIA articles! In mathematics, the Whitehead manifold is an open 3-manifold that is contractible, but not homeomorphic to R3. Henry Whitehead discovered this puzzling object while he was trying to prove the Poincare conjecture. A contractible manifold is one that can continuously be shrunk to a point inside the manifold itself. For example, an open ball is a contractible manifold. All manifolds homeomorphic to the ball are contractible, too. One can ask whether all contractible manifolds are homeomorphic to a ball. For dimensions 1 and 2, the answer is classical and it is "yes". In dimension 2, it follows, for example, from the Riemann mapping theorem. Dimension 3 presents the first counterexample: the Whitehead manifold.

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