# The Unapologetic Mathematician

## Homotopy

The common layman’s definition of topology generally involves rubber sheets or clay, with the idea that things are “the same” if they can be stretched, squeezed, or bent from one shape into the other. But the notions of topological equivalence we’ve been using up until now don’t really match up to this picture. Homeomorphism — or diffeomorphism, for differentiable manifolds — is about having continuous maps in either direction, but there’s nothing at all to correspond to the whole stretching and squeezing idea.

Instead, we have homotopy. But instead of saying that spaces are homotopic, we say that two maps $f_0,f_1:M\to N$ are homotopic if the one can be “stretched and squeezed” into the other. And since this stretching and squeezing is a process to take place over time, we will view it sort of like a movie.

We say that a continuous function $H:M\times[0,1]\to N$ is a continuous homotopy from $f_0$ to $f_1$ if $H(p,0)=f_0(p)$ and $H(p,1)=f_1(p)$ for all $p\in M$. For any time $t\in[0,1]$, the map $p\mapsto H(p,t)$ is a continuous map from $M$ to $N$, which is sort of like a “frame” in the movie that takes us from $f_0$ to $f_1$. As time passes over the interval, we highlight one frame at a time to watch the one function transform into the other.

To flip this around, imagine starting with a process of stretching and squeezing to turn one shape into another. In this case, when we say “shape” we really mean a subspace or submanifold of some outside space we occupy, like the three-dimensional space that contains our idiomatic doughnuts and coffee mugs. The maps in this case are the inclusions of the subspaces into the larger space.

Anyway, next imagine carrying out this process, but with a camera recording it at each step. Then cut out all the frames from the movie and stack them up. We see in each layer of this flipbook how the shape $M$ at that time is included into the larger space $N$. That is, we have a homotopy.

Now, for an example: we say that a space is “contractible” if its inclusion into itself is homotopic to a map of the whole space to a single point within the space. As a particular example, the unit ball $B^n\subseteq\mathbb{R}^n$ is contractible. Explicitly, we define a homotopy $H:B^n\times[0,1]\to B^n$latex H(p,t)=(1-t)p\$, which is certainly smooth; we can check that $H(p,0)=p$ and $H(p,1)=0$, so at one end we have the identity map of $B^n$ into itself, while at the other we have the constant map sending all of $B^n$ to the single point at the origin.

We should be careful to point out that homotopy only requires that the function $H$ be continuous, and not invertible in any sense. In particular, there’s no guarantee that the frame $p\mapsto H(p,t)$ for some fixed $t$ is a homeomorphism from $M$ onto its image. If it turns out that each frame is a homeomorphism of $M$ onto its image, then we say that $H$ is an “isotopy”.

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Posted by John Armstrong | Differential Topology, Topology

## 5 Comments	»

1. [...] can think of homotopies between maps as morphisms in a category that has the maps as objects. In terms of the movie [...]

Pingback by | November 29, 2011 | Reply

2. [...] time, while talking about homotopies as morphisms I said that I didn’t want to get too deeply into the reparameterization thing [...]

Pingback by | November 30, 2011 | Reply

3. [...] we’ve seen that differentiable manifolds, smooth maps, and homotopies form a 2-category, but it’s not the only 2-category around. The algebra of differential forms [...]

Pingback by | December 2, 2011 | Reply

4. [...] a great example of this, let’s say that is a contractible manifold. That is, the identity map and the constant map for some are homotopic. These two maps [...]

Pingback by | December 6, 2011 | Reply

5. [...] say that a space is “simply-connected” if any closed curve with is homotopic to a constant curve that stays at the single point . Intuitively, this means that any loop in the [...]

Pingback by | December 14, 2011 | Reply

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