Homotopy commutativity in Hermitian symmetric spaces

Abstract

Ganea proved that the loop space of $\mathbb{C}{P}^n$ is homotopy commutative if and only if $n=3$. We generalize this result to that the loop spaces of all irreducible Hermitian symmetric spaces but $\mathbb{C}{P}^3$ are not homotopy commutative. The computation also applies to determining the homotopy nilpotency of the loop spaces of flag manifolds.

8 pages