Invariants de Vassiliev et conjecture de Poincaré

We prove the following result: if Vassiliev invariants distinguish knots in each homotopy sphere, then the Poincaré conjecture is true, in other words every homotopy sphere is homeomorphic to the standard sphere. On the other hand, in every Whitehead manifold there exist knots that cannot be distinguished by Vassiliev invariants. To cite this article: M. Eisermann, C. R. Acad. Sci. Paris, Ser. I 334 (2002) 1005–1010.