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Rational Homotopy Theory I I
Yves F´ elix, Steve Halperin and Jean-Claude Thomas World Scientic Book, 412 pages, to appear in March 2012.
Abstract Sullivan’s seminal paper, Infinitesimal Computations in Topology, includes the ap- plication of his techniques to non-simply connected spaces, and these ideas have been used frequently by other authors. Our objective in this sequel to our “Rational Homo- topy Theory I, published by Springer-Verlag in 2001, is to provide a complete descrip- tion with detailed proofs of this material. This then provides the basis for new results, also included, and which we complement with recent advances for simply-connected
- spaces. There do remain many interesting unanswered questions in the field, which
hopefully this text will make it easier for others to resolve.
1 Introduction
Rational homotopy theory assigns to topological spaces invariants which are preserved by continuous maps f for which H∗(f; Q) is an isomorphism. The two standard approaches of the theory are due respectively to Quillen [58] and Sullivan [61], and [62]. Each constructs from a class of CW complexes X an algebraic model MX, and then constructs from MX a CW complex XQ, together with a map ϕX : X → XQ. Both H∗(XQ; Z) and πn(XQ) are rational vector spaces, and with appropriate hypotheses H∗(ϕX) : H∗(X) ⊗ Q → H∗(XQ; Z) , and πn(ϕX) : πn(X) ⊗ Q → πn(XQ), n ≥ 2, are isomorphisms. In each case the model MX belongs to an algebraic homotopy category, and a homo- topy class of maps f : X → Y induces a homotopy class of morphisms Mf : MX → MY (in Quillen approach) and a homotopy class of morphisms Mf : MY → MX (in Sullivan’s approach). These are referred to as representatives of f. In Quillen’s approach, X is required to be simply connected and MX is a rational differential graded Lie algebra which is free as a graded Lie algebra. In this case H∗(ϕX) and π≥2(ϕX) are always isomorphisms. Here, as in [18], we adopt Sullivan’s approach, and in this Introduction provide an
- verview of the material in the monograph, together with brief summaries of the individual
Chapters. Sullivan’s approach associates to each path connected space X a cochain algebra MX
- f the form (∧V, d) in which the free commutative graded algebra ∧V is generated by