Kinoshita conjecture on reducibility of knotted projective planes
A smoothly embedded projective plane in is knotted if it is not the standard unknotted embedding, and it is reducible if it admits an unknotted summand that is not a -sphere. Kinoshita's conjecture. Every knotted projective plane in is reducible. The conjecture was posed as a well-known claim in the study of embedded surfaces in and is disproved by the paper's construction of an irreducible embedded projective plane.
References
Primary source
Mark Hughes, Seungwon Kim, Maggie Miller and Gheehyun Nahm, “An irreducible real projective plane in the 4-sphere”, arXiv:2605.12921 (2026).
Additional references
2 papers in this index state this conjecture (2025–2026). The statement above is taken from the most recent of them; the others are arXiv:2504.03086.
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