irreducible n-manifold
An -manifold (http://planetmath.org/TopologicalManifold) is calledirreducible if for each embedding of a standard -sphere in, there is an embedding of a standard -ball (http://planetmath.org/StandardNBall) in such that theimage of the boundary coincides with the image of.
In case of dimension three it can be proved that each irreducible3-manifold is also a prime (http://planetmath.org/Prime3Manifold) 3-manifold.