Related papers: A colimit of classifying spaces

This is a continuation of an earlier preprint (math.GT/0209121) under the same title. These papers grew out of an attempt to find a suitable finite sheeted covering of an aspherical 3-manifold so that the cover either has infinite or…

Like categories, small 2-categories have well-understood classifying spaces. In this paper, we deal with homotopy types represented by 2-diagrams of 2-categories. Our results extend to homotopy colimits of 2-functors lower categorical…

We explain how the notion of homotopy colimits gives rise to that of mapping spaces, even in categories which are not simplicial. We apply the technique of model approximations and use elementary properties of the category of spaces to be…

We prove several positive results regarding representation of homotopy classes of spheres and algebraic groups by regular mappings. Most importantly we show that every mapping from a sphere to an orthogonal or a unitary group is homotopic…

Among the generalizations of Serre's theorem on the homotopy groups of a finite complex we isolate the one proposed by Dwyer and Wilkerson. Even though the spaces they consider must be 2-connected, we show that it can be used to both…

We give a simplified proof of J. A. Wolf's classification of finite groups that can act freely and isometrically on a round sphere of some dimension. We slightly improve the classification by removing some non-obvious redundancy. The groups…

In a previous article, we introduced notions of finiteness obstruction, Euler characteristic, and L^2-Euler characteristic for wide classes of categories. In this sequel, we prove the compatibility of those notions with homotopy colimits of…

This paper grew out of an attempt to find a suitable finite sheeted covering of an aspherical 3-manifold so that the cover either has infinite or trivial first homology group. With this motivation we define a new class of groups. These…

Let G be a finite group. The unit sphere in a finite-dimensional orthogonal G-representation motivates the definition of homotopy representations, due to tom Dieck. We introduce an algebraic analogue, and establish its basic properties…

We give an elementary proof of the Hurewicz theorem relating homotopy and homology groups of a cubical Kan complex. Our approach is based on the notion of a loop space of a cubical set, developed in a companion paper ``Homotopy groups of…

This paper develops a basic theory of H-groups. We introduce a special quotient of H-groups and extend some algebraic constructions of topological groups to the category of H-groups and H-maps. We use these constructions to prove some…

We show that the homotopy category of unpointed spaces admits no set of objects jointly reflecting isomorphisms by giving an explicit counterexample involving large symmetric groups. We also show that, in contrast, the spheres jointly…

We study the realization problem of finite groups as the group of homotopy classes of self-homotopy equivalences of finite spaces. Let $G$ be a finite group. Using an infinite family of pairwise non weakly homotopic asymmetric spaces we…

The classifying space BG of a topological group $G$ can be filtered by a sequence of subspaces $B(q,G)$, using the descending central series of free groups. If $G$ is finite, describing them as homotopy colimits is convenient when applying…

In this paper we give a formula for the homotopy groups of $(n-1)$-connected $2n$-manifolds as a direct sum of homotopy groups of spheres in the case the $n^{th}$ Betti number is larger than $1$. We demonstrate that when the $n^{th}$ Betti…

We compute the homotopy groups of the spaces of self maps of Lie groups of rank 2, SU(3), Sp(2), and G_2. We use the cell structures of these Lie groups and the standard methods of homotopy theory.

We obtain explicit formulas for the rational homotopy groups of generalised symmetric spaces, i.e., the homogeneous spaces for which the isotropy subgroup appears as the fixed point group of some finite order automorphism of the group. In…

We show that the classifying space of a $p$-local compact group is approximated by a telescope of classifying spaces of $p$-local finite groups. This result has numerous implications, like a Stable Elements Theorem for $p$-local compact…

The homotopy theory of gauge groups has received considerable attention in recent decades. In this work, we study the homotopy theory of gauge groups over some high dimensional manifolds. To be more specific, we study gauge groups of…

Broadly speaking the present is a homotopy complement to the book of Giraud, albeit in a couple of different ways. In the first place there is a representability theorem for maps to a topological champ (a.k.a. stack) and whence an extremely…