A Course In Simple Homotopy Theory

This book grew out of courses which I taught at Cornell University and the University of Warwick during 1969 and 1970. I wrote it because of a strong belief that there should be readily available a semi-historical and geo metrically motivated exposition of J. H. C. Whitehead's beautiful theory of simple-homotopy types; that the best way to understand this theory is to know how and why it was built. This belief is buttressed by the fact that the major uses of, and advances in, the theory in recent times-for example, the s-cobordism theorem (discussed in §25), the use of the theory in surgery, its extension to non-compact complexes (discussed at the end of §6) and the proof of topological invariance (given in the Appendix)-have come from just such an understanding. A second reason for writing the book is pedagogical. This is an excellent subject for a topology student to "grow up" on. The interplay between geometry and algebra in topology, each enriching the other, is beautifully illustrated in simple-homotopy theory. The subject is accessible (as in the courses mentioned at the outset) to students who have had a good one semester course in algebraic topology. I have tried to write proofs which meet the needs of such students. (When a proof was omitted and left as an exercise, it was done with the welfare of the student in mind. He should do such exercises zealously.

"This book provides a thorough and well-written guide to abstract homotopy theory. It could well serve as a graduate text in this topic, or could be studied independently by someone with a background in basic algebra, topology, and category theory."

The abstract homotopy theory is based on the observation that analogues of much of the topological homotopy theory and simple homotopy theory exist in many other categories (e.g. spaces over a fixed base, groupoids, chain complexes, module categories). Studying categorical versions of homotopy structure, such as cylinders and path space constructions, enables not only a unified development of many examples of known homotopy theories but also reveals the inner working of the classical spatial theory. This demonstrates the logical interdependence of properties (in particular the existence of certain Kan fillers in associated cubical sets) and results (Puppe sequences, Vogt's Iemma, Dold's theorem on fibre homotopy equivalences, and homotopy coherence theory).

Since the beginning of the modern era of algebraic topology, simplicial methods have been used systematically and effectively for both computation and basic theory. With the development of Quillen's concept of a closed model category and, in particular, a simplicial model category, this collection of methods has become the primary way to describe non-abelian homological algebra and to address homotopy-theoretical issues in a variety of fields, including algebraic K-theory. This book supplies a modern exposition of these ideas, emphasizing model category theoretical techniques. Discussed here are the homotopy theory of simplicial sets, and other basic topics such as simplicial groups, Postnikov towers, and bisimplicial sets. The more advanced material includes homotopy limits and colimits, localization with respect to a map and with respect to a homology theory, cosimplicial spaces, and homotopy coherence. Interspersed throughout are many results and ideas well-known to experts, but uncollected in the literature. Intended for second-year graduate students and beyond, this book introduces many of the basic tools of modern homotopy theory. An extensive background in topology is not assumed.

Several recent investigations have focused attention on spaces and manifolds which are non-compact but where the problems studied have some kind of "control near infinity". This monograph introduces the category of spaces that are "boundedly controlled" over the (usually non-compact) metric space Z. It sets out to develop the algebraic and geometric tools needed to formulate and to prove boundedly controlled analogues of many of the standard results of algebraic topology and simple homotopy theory. One of the themes of the book is to show that in many cases the proof of a standard result can be easily adapted to prove the boundedly controlled analogue and to provide the details, often omitted in other treatments, of this adaptation. For this reason, the book does not require of the reader an extensive background. In the last chapter it is shown that special cases of the boundedly controlled Whitehead group are strongly related to lower K-theoretic groups, and the boundedly controlled theory is compared to Siebenmann's proper simple homotopy theory when Z = IR or IR2.

This categorical perspective on homotopy theory helps consolidate and simplify one's understanding of derived functors, homotopy limits and colimits, and model categories, among others.