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Physical Sciences and Mathematics Commons

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Doctoral Dissertations

Mathematics

University of Tennessee, Knoxville

Homotopy

Publication Year

Articles 1 - 2 of 2

Full-Text Articles in Physical Sciences and Mathematics

Big Homotopy Theory, Keith Gordon Penrod May 2013

Big Homotopy Theory, Keith Gordon Penrod

Doctoral Dissertations

Cannon and Conner developed the theory of "big fundamental groups." This is meant to expand on the notion of fundamental group and is a powerful tool that can be used for distinguishing spaces that are not distinguishable using the fundamental group. Turner proved several classical results, such as covering theory and Seifert-VanKampen for big fundamental groups. The purpose of this paper is to expand on the the theory, to refine the definitions, and to give more examples. Also, in this paper, we define big higher homotopy groups analogous to the way classical higher homotopy groups are defined.


Discrete Geometric Homotopy Theory And Critical Values Of Metric Spaces, Leonard Duane Wilkins May 2011

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 …