3-sphere two 3-balls. This construction is analogous to a construction of a 2-sphere, performed by gluing the boundaries of a pair of disks. A disk is a 2-ball, and the boundary of a disk is a circle (a 1-sphere). Let a pair of disks be of the same diameter. Superpose them and glue corresponding points on their boundaries. Again one may think of the third dimension as temperature. Likewise, we may inflate the 2-sphere, moving the pair of disks to become the northern and southern hemispheres. After removing a single point from the 2-sphere, what remains is homeomorphic to the Euclidean
Sphere -ball; thus, it is homeomorphic to the Euclidean -sphere, but perhaps lacking its metric. The -sphere is denoted . It is an example of a compact topological manifold without boundary. A sphere need not be smooth; if it is smooth, it need not be diffeomorphic to the Euclidean sphere. The Heine–Borel theorem implies that a Euclidean -sphere is compact. The sphere is the inverse image of a one-point set under the continuous function . Therefore, the sphere is closed. is also bounded; therefore it is compact. Remarkably, it is possible to turn an ordinary sphere inside out in a three-dimensional