Extendability of simplicial maps is undecidable

Abstract

We present a short proof of the \v{C}adek-Kr\v{c}\'al-Matou\v{s}ek-Vok\v{r}\'inek-Wagner result from the title (in the following form due to Filakovsk\'y-Wagner-Zhechev). For any fixed even $l$ there is no algorithm recognizing the extendability of the identity map of $S^l$ to a PL map $X\to S^l$ of given $2l$-dimensional simplicial complex $X$ containing a subdivision of $S^l$ as a given subcomplex. We also exhibit a gap in the Filakovsk\'y-Wagner-Zhechev proof that embeddability of complexes is undecidable in codimension $>1$.