Homotopy theory

This is part 6 of a series leading up to and exploring model categories. For the other parts see the series overview. Through the series so far we have covered the basic uses of fibrations and related things, like the long exact sequence of homotopy groups, the Serre spectral sequence, fiber bundles and homotopy groups of spheres. But, we have not mentioned that fibrations has a dual construct, namely cofibrations. The road we are heading with this series, as mentioned before, is to define Model categories, and discover how to use them....

Some time ago I saw this problem of hanging a picture on the wall using a string and two nails in such a way that if you remove one of the nails from the wall, the picture falls down. This is a bad way to hang pictures you immediately say, and I would agree. I saw some solution to the problem, and didn’t think about it for many years, until this week when I figured out that we need homotopy, in particular the fundamental group, to do it!...

This is part 5 of a series leading up to and exploring model categories. For the other parts see the series overview. As promised in the previous part, we are going to calculate $\pi_4(S^3)$. I think we will have to use all of the machinery (plus some new) that we have been through during this series to do the calculation. What more could we possibly need you ask? Last time we developed the machinery to calculate the cohomology of the total space of a fibration, but we want to compute homotopy....

This is part 4 of a series leading up to and exploring model categories. For the other parts see the series overview. My personal favorite part about fibrations is that they come equipped with a natural way to compute the cohomology of the total space from the cohomology of the base and the cohomology of the fibers. This process is encoded in a structure called a spectral sequence, and is a complicated object in its full generality....

This is part 3 of a series leading up to and exploring model categories. For the other parts see the series overview. For an introduction to the material, the definitions, motivation and some examples, please read part 1 and part 2 about fibrations and fiber bundles. This and the the following parts of this series will be about their usefulness, especially in computing homology and homotopy groups. This will be done through two different techniques, namely the long exact sequence of homotopy groups, and the spectral sequence associated to a fibration....

This is part 2 of a series leading up to and exploring model categories. For the other parts see the series overview. Yesterday we discussed the standard definition of a fibration by the homotopy lifting property, and today we are continuing that discussion, but in a more visual manner. This we will do by first looking at fiber bundles, and then generalizing them. Since fibrations are generalized fiber bundles, every fiber bundle is an example of a fibration, and they have been the most important examples for me, as they help me visualize and get intuition into the fibrations without having to really use the full generality of the definition....

This is part 1 of a series leading up to and exploring model categories. For the other parts see the series overview. My main mathematical interest for the last couple years has been algebraic topology. I feel it suits my needs for intuition, and graphical picturing of what happens. A concept I have been learning more rigorously recently is fibrations, and how to use them in computing homotopy groups and homology groups of different spaces....