Physical Sciences and Mathematics Commons^™

Discrete Geometric Homotopy Theory And Critical Values Of Metric Spaces, Leonard Duane Wilkins

Doctoral Dissertations

Building on the work of Conrad Plaut and Valera Berestovskii regarding uniform spaces and the covering spectrum of Christina Sormani and Guofang Wei developed for geodesic spaces, the author defines and develops discrete homotopy theory for metric spaces, which can be thought of as a discrete analog of classical path-homotopy and covering space theory. Given a metric space, X, this leads to the construction of a collection of covering spaces of X - and corresponding covering groups - parameterized by the positive real numbers, which we call the [epsilon]-covers and the [epsilon]-groups. These covers and groups evolve dynamically as the …