Homotopy in wild spaces

If I’m thinking about wild topology, I’m probably thinking about topological spaces (geometric-type objects) which have points where non-trivial structure is visible no matter how far you zoom in. Though I’m not so interested in generating fractals, these pretty little things do reach the point of being “complex on an infinitely small scale.”

Since we are talking about homotopy, we are allowed to bend and stretch the objects (but not cut or puncture them) and consider it to be the same object. The object of homotopy theory is to classify spaces up to homotopy equivalence: Two spaces and are homotopy equivalent if there are maps and such that the compositions and .

When spaces look “simple” on a local level (like manifolds or CW-complexes), this classification boils down to using discrete gadgets (like homotopy groups) that look for algebraic structure hiding within. Things become much more complicated when you begin to allow local pathologies; if your space has important structure as you zoom in you’d better make sure it’s still there when you zoom in on your newly deformed object!

The tip of the iceberg

Even in the usual Euclidean plane we learn about in middle and high school it is all too easy to construct such objects. One of the simplest examples is the earring space which can be constructed by taking a sequence of circles that get smaller and smaller and all converge up on a single point of intersection.

We can realize the earring space as a compact planar set: If

,

then

so the point is the intersection .

Note the earring space is distinct from the countable wedge of circles only at a single point. In fact, there is a continuous bijection

which is a local homeomorphism at every point except the intersection point. This one point makes a world of difference. For one, the earring space is compact and is not. For another, the two are not homotopy equivalence; we’ll investigate the details later.

Despite the simple appearance, has an enormous amount of combinatorial group theory and topological algebra hiding within…and this is pretty much the simplest example of a space where covering space theory falls apart.

The rest

More generally, you could ask: What does it take to classify connected subspaces of the plane up to homotopy equivalence? What if we add conditions like locally path connectedness or compactness? What if we extend to subspaces of ?

One of the blossoming approaches to these questions makes use of a classical tool in topology: the fundamental group . This is likely to be the topic of upcoming posts if I can manage to find the time to write them…