Ambient isotopy

In the mathematical subject of topology, an ambient isotopy, also called an h-isotopy, is a kind of continuous distortion of an ambient space, for example a manifold, taking a submanifold to another submanifold. For example in knot theory, one considers two knots the same if one can distort one knot into the other without breaking it. Such a distortion is an example of an ambient isotopy. More precisely, let and be manifolds and and be embeddings of in . A continuous map is defined to be an ambient isotopy taking to if is the identity map, each map is a homeomorphism from to itself, and . This implies that the orientation must be preserved by ambient isotopies. For example, two knots that are s of each other are, in general, not equivalent.