A natural pseudometric on homotopy groups of metric spaces

Abstract

For a path-connected metric space $(X,d)$, the $n$-th homotopy group ${\pi }_n(X)$ inherits a natural pseudometric from the $n$-th iterated loop space with the uniform metric. This pseudometric gives ${\pi }_n(X)$ the structure of a topological group and when $X$ is compact, the induced pseudometric topology is independent of the metric $d$. In this paper, we study the properties of this pseudometric and how it relates to previously studied structures on ${\pi }_n(X)$. Our main result is that the pseudometric topology agrees with the shape topology on ${\pi }_n(X)$ if $X$ is compact and $L{C}^{n-1}$ or if $X$ is an inverse limit of finite polyhedra with retraction bonding maps.

17 pages, 2 figures

References in corpus (2)

• On small homotopies of loops
• Elements of higher homotopy groups undetectable by polyhedral approximation

Cited by in corpus (1)

• Comparison of Topologies on Fundamental Groups with Subgroup Topology Viewpoint