12/04/2006, 11:00 — 12:00 — Sala P3.10, Pavilhão de Matemática João Faria Martins, Centro de Análise Matemática, Geometria e Sistemas Dinâmicos
On the homotopy type and the fundamental crossed complex of the skeletal filtration of a CW-complex
We prove that if is a CW-complex, then the homotopy type of the skeletal filtration of does not depend on the cell decomposition of up to wedge products with -disks , when they are given their natural CW-decomposition with unique cells of order , and ; a result resembling J.H.C. Whitehead's work on simple homotopy types. From the Colimit Theorem for the Fundamental Crossed Complex of a CW-complex (due to R. Brown and P.J. Higgins), follows an algebraic analogue for the fundamental crossed complex of the skeletal filtration of , which thus depends only on the homotopy type of (as a space) up to free product with crossed complexes of the type . This expands an old result (due to J.H.C. Whitehead) asserting that the homotopy type of depends only on the homotopy type of . We use these results to define a homotopy invariant of CW-complexes for any finite crossed complex . We interpret it in terms of the weak homotopy type of the function space , where is the classifying space of the crossed complex .