Published online by Cambridge University Press: 24 October 2008
This paper addresses the question of how well the exterior of a knot determines the knot. It is well known that for a knotted sphere pair (Sn+2, Sn), n ≥ 2, a given exterior corresponds to at most two distinct knots (1), (4), (10); examples of distinct knots with the same exterior are given in (2), (6). For a knotted ball pair (Bn+2, Bn), n ≥ 2, the situation may be more complicated. In fact, given an arbitrary positive integer N, Hitt-Sumners (7), (8) constructed N distinct ball pairs with the same exterior, n ≥ 4.