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    • CommentRowNumber1.
    • CommentAuthorronniegpd
    • CommentTimeJul 8th 2012
    I have been looking at the page http://ncatlab.org/nlab/show/higher+homotopy+van+Kampen+theorem and it seems to me misleading. Urs suggested this should be discussed on the forum.

    This entry gives a theorem on simplicial singular complexes of a space with an open cover stated as due to Lurie, Theorem A.1.1, (I have not found the reference!) and then writes:

    "The following is a version of the above general statement restricted to a strict ∞-groupoid-version of the fundamental ∞-groupoid and applicable for topological spaces that are equipped with the extra structure of a filtered topological space." Then there is a correct statement of the theorem due to Higgins and myself.

    It seems to me that the quoted statement seems to imply that the "general statement" implies the "following version", whereas I do not see any evidence for that. There seems to be a related work by Carlos Simpson, arXiv:alg-geom/9704006v2, but the same comments as below apply also to that.

    The "general statement" seems to me a version of a result commonly called in the literature "excision" and there is a nice proof which I like in the paper Sch{\"o}n, R. "Acyclic models and excision" . _Proc. Amer. Math. Soc._ 59~(1) (1976) 167--168, of which a version is given in 10.4.20 of our book "Nonabelian algebraic topology".

    However the van Kampen theorems in which I have been involved are of a quite different nature, and all, including the 1-dimensional case, involve strict structures, and strict colimits. This is important for the calculational and computational aspects, and for applications in geometry and algebra. So these expositions on ncatlab need to be clear about what is and what is not a consequence of what.

    At dimension 2 the situation is even clearer. One of the aims of the work with Higgins was to recover a theorem of Whitehead on free crossed modules; I published an exposition of Whitehead's proof in ``On the second relative homotopy group of an adjunction
    space: an exposition of a theorem of J.H.C. Whitehead'', _J. London Math. Soc._ (2) 22 (1980) 146-152. Our paper published in 1978 does have this theorem as a corollary, and other results not obtainable by standard methods of algebraic topology. See our book referred to above. The van Kampen theorem published with Loday has a sophisticated proof, and gives very precise results. I have given a brief summary of references on applications of higher homotopy van Kampen theorems, as http://pages.bangor.ac.uk/~mas010/pdffiles/appHvKT.pdf ; among those is my bibliography on the nonabelian tensor product, which contains 120 items.

    I informed Urs I was editing this page, as he was the last editor, and explained why; he suggested it needed a forum discussion. It would indeed be interesting to know if the precise van Kampen type theorems can follow from general methods of weak $\infty$-groupoids and so called "modern homotopy theory" , but so far I have not seen the evidence! A key test case is to deduce Whitehead's theorem on free crossed modules, which does follow from the precise van higher Kampen theorems. Maybe this work "precise" should be used as a distinguishing character!

    This result of Whitehead is important for the foundations of nonabelian algebraic topology, since it allows one to write for the boundary of the usual square giving the Klein bottle $\delta \sigma= a+b-a+b$, a nonabelian formula, instead of the usual $\partial \sigma =2b$.



    Comments welcome.

    Ronnie Brown
    • CommentRowNumber2.
    • CommentAuthorUrs
    • CommentTimeJul 8th 2012

    Lurie, Theorem A.1.1, (I have not found the reference!)

    You just need to follow the link given there to find it. It is theorem A.1.1 on p. 134 in Lurie’s article on E kE_k-algebras.

    Meanwhile this is also section A.3 of Higher Algebra.

    • CommentRowNumber3.
    • CommentAuthorTim_Porter
    • CommentTimeJul 8th 2012

    Lurie proves a homotopy version of the old result (already in Spanier, but much older) that the includion of the U-small singular chains into the singular chains is a chain equivalence. This does not seem to imply the higher dimensional vKTs without more work. Phil Ehlers explored in his thesis the way in which this sort of result but for simplicially enriched groupoids seemed to give a notion of thinness which allowed the retraction of the singular invariants of the whole space to be collapsed down to those of the colimit of the small space. He did not take this idea far enough to be publishable.

    Ronnie’s point is I think that whilst his results give for (partial) algebraic models of the homotopy type a calculation of the whole of the model given the parts, the result of Lurie only gives things up to homotopy. This is perhaps the difference between the methods of Combinatorial Homotopy theory and Homotopical Algebra. Both are important, but it would be interesting to see if for instance the Brown-Loday vKt could be derived from Lurie’s result without a large amount of extra effort. (I have considered the problem yet, so have no great light to shed on it!)

    A more specific question would be to see what results as Lurie proves say about the homotopy type of the suspension of a K(G,1) as there the Brown-Loday form allows explicit calculations.

    • CommentRowNumber4.
    • CommentAuthorronniegpd
    • CommentTimeJul 8th 2012
    I have now seen the relevant section of Lurie's book, labelled the Seifert-van Kampen Theorem. He states the standard version of this for pushouts of fundamental groups, then proves a general theorem in which the word "group" does not occur.

    There is no evidence from what is written that he can recover from his general theorem his own statement of the SvKT or the version of the Seifert--van Kampen theorem proved in

    R. Brown and A. Razak, ``A van Kampen theorem for unions of non-connected spaces'', _Archiv. Math._ 42 (1984) 85-88.

    (which basically states you get a (strict) coequaliser diagram for fundamental groupoids on a set $A$ of base points provided the set $A$ meets each 1-,2-,3-fold intersection of the sets of the cover)
    (though he might be able to do so) or the theorem of Whitehead on free crossed modules, which is a corollary of our 2-d Seifert-van Kampen theorem, which has wider consequences and yields explicit nonabelian calculations (see Part I of "Nonabelian algebraic topology").

    I look forward to seeing the detailed proofs, if they can be done.
    • CommentRowNumber5.
    • CommentAuthorUrs
    • CommentTimeJul 8th 2012
    • (edited Jul 8th 2012)

    There is no evidence from what is written that he can recover from his general theorem his own statement of the SvKT

    It’s a direct consequence of lemma A.1.3.

    Ronnie’s point is I think that whilst his results give for (partial) algebraic models of the homotopy type a calculation of the whole of the model given the parts, the result of Lurie only gives things up to homotopy.

    If you look at the proof (p. 136) you see that it proceeds by computing the 1-categorical colimit that you are looking for.

    Concerning the entry higher homotopy van Kampen theorem: what I did suggest is that if you do edit the entry you are welcome to add useful information, but I ask you please not to continue a fight against other authors in homotopy theory. If somebody else gives a construction and proves a result that generalizes yours, this is not belittling your contribution, but on the contrary, shows that is is useful, fruitful and blossoming.

    • CommentRowNumber6.
    • CommentAuthorronniegpd
    • CommentTimeJul 8th 2012
    • (edited Jul 8th 2012)
    "Proposition A.1.2 is itself a consequence of the following result, which guarantees that Sing(X) is weakly
    homotopy equivalent to the simplicial subset consisting of “small” simplices:" We have known this.

    "If somebody else gives a construction and proves a result that generalizes yours, this is not belittling your contribution,.. "

    I am trying to understand how that result generalises mine, that is all!!! Please explain.

    I suspect that the situation is that the results which Higgins and Loday and I proved are quite separate from Lurie's, and it seems useful to point this out. This is not an attack on Lurie's wide ranging exposition. It is useful for the subject, actually absolutely necessary, to analyse what has been achieved and what has not. The history of mathematics shows that people do often use the same name for things that are different, and this causes confusion, which one should try to avoid. Is that the case here? That needs to be decided.
    • CommentRowNumber7.
    • CommentAuthorDavidRoberts
    • CommentTimeJul 9th 2012
    • (edited Jul 9th 2012)

    On the face of it, without intensive thought, the way to connect the result dealing with homotopy colimits of singular sets and strict colimits of fundamental crossed complexes is a vKT for the functor sSetCrsCplxsSet \to CrsCplx. This probably is a serious amount of work, as it looks like a serious theorem to me. Notice that because strict colimits appear it is not automatic by usual homotopical abstract nonsense.

    An interesting question is this: what is the homotopy colimit of the simplicial sets associated to strict algebraic models of homotopy types. That is, we are just asking whether the (EDIT: essential or possibly up-to-homotopy) image of StrictAlgebraicModelssSetStrictAlgebraicModels \to sSet is closed under homotopy colimits. A separate, but related question, is when we can write these homotopy colimits as strict colimits. Given a good relation between the two theorems, as in my first paragraph, we can then say that Ronnie’s results are of this form.

    I should point out that the version that appears in the nLab page is not the same as appears in appendix A in Higher Algebra. The latter is closer in flavour to Ronnie’s work involving filtered spaces, rather than the version involving pushouts of open sets. The nLab page of HHvKT is the target of a link at the page for Higher Algebra under the heading of appendix A. At the very least the relation to the exit path version should be clarified (yes, yes, I know, I should do this rather than say ’someone should do it’…). I don’t know whether this is also a non-trivial result, but it seems pretty serious.

    • CommentRowNumber8.
    • CommentAuthorTim_Porter
    • CommentTimeJul 9th 2012

    @Urs Ronnie is NOT ‘fighting other authors in homotopy theory’. I think you may not understand the viewpoint that he is defending.

    The fact that the singular complex of a space is the colimit of the U-small singular complexes under certain conditions has been well known for a long time. Lurie’s proof is neat and concise… fine. Within homotopy theory the calculations tend to want algebraic models of things. Perhaps for instance with the 2-type and their 2-groupoid models, this will be up to an algebraic form of homotopy (and that homotopy can be made explicit). One wants smallish calculable invariants and perhaps eventually numbers, explicit cohomology classes etc. The classical SvKT can be derived immediately from Lurie’s statement since the fundamental groupoid is a left adjoint and is homotopy invariant, but the Brown-Higgins’ 2-dimensional one is surely not immediate from Lurie’s form. The point being that their specific model for a 2-type depends on a presentation of the homotopy type of the space, e.g. as a CW-complex. With that information you get a definite representative for the homotopy 2-type of the space and a recipe for calculating that specific representative from the analogous small models. Using the singular complex you get enormous models for the homotopy 2-type. Those can be useful, but are not the same. In some of the current writings on (weak) infinity groupoids.

    This is a complementary vision of some parts of homotopy theory (and is well represented in modern homotopy theory which is not just model category structures). As I have said before this is nearer the idea of Combinatorial Homotopy Theory as put forward by JHC Whitehead than the homotopical algebra stream of research.

    • CommentRowNumber9.
    • CommentAuthorHarry Gindi
    • CommentTimeJul 9th 2012

    I’m with Ronnie and Tim on this one. Also, the very idea of calling the total singular complex of a space its “fundamental ∞-groupoid” borders on ridiculous. The fundamental ∞-groupoid of a space should be a Batanin-Leinster or Grothendieck-Maltsiniotis weak ω-groupoid. Declaring the singular complex to be the fundamental ∞-groupoid just feels cheap, since we end up with something that is, for all intents and purposes, as difficult to work with as the space itself.

    • CommentRowNumber10.
    • CommentAuthorUrs
    • CommentTimeJul 9th 2012

    I should point out that the version that appears in the nLab page is not the same as appears in appendix A in Higher Algebra.

    It is, in section A.1 of Higher Algebra. The statement in A.3 is the generalization to stratified spaces and “exit paths”. And I don’t think that this stratification can be identified with the filtering used elsewhere.

    The filtering is essentially a way to remember cellular structure even when talking about topological spaces. The stratification gives genuinely more structure: it leads to fundamental higher categories.

    • CommentRowNumber11.
    • CommentAuthorronniegpd
    • CommentTimeJul 9th 2012
    • (edited Jul 9th 2012)
    Of course I agree with Tim. If result A is called a generalisation of result B, then B should be deducible from A.

    In this case, there is a world of difference between a homotopy colimit of lax structures and a strict colimit of strict structures, these structures being in the cases under discussion: fundamental groupoids with a set of base points, relative homotopy groups (with operations of a fundamental groupoid), n-adic homotopy groups (with detailed structure arising from r-adic groups with r < n).

    This passage from a lax structure to a strict structure is part of the detailed proofs in the work of Brown-Higgins and Brown-Loday. Working with strict structures enables specific calculations, related to problems in other areas of mathematics. This follows the vision of JHC Whitehead, as Tim remarks: Henry was interested in algorithmic methods, and this is part of the inspiration of say simple homotopy type.

    All this needs to be made clear on the ncatlab.
    • CommentRowNumber12.
    • CommentAuthorUrs
    • CommentTimeJul 9th 2012

    The classical SvKT can be derived immediately from Lurie’s statement since the fundamental groupoid is a left adjoint

    And so are all the higher truncations, say to the fundamental 2-groupoid.

    I would suggest that if you want to have the theorems understood as being about models, and not about the intrinsic statement that they present, then let’s start a new entry models for higher van Kampen.

    • CommentRowNumber13.
    • CommentAuthorUrs
    • CommentTimeJul 9th 2012

    ridiculous

    By the way, I will not engage anymore in discussion involving this behaviour. You do notice that I could just as easily state the claim that your point of view is ridiculous. And then, where would we be? This is a forum for discussion, and discussion ends when the participants don’t stick to basic rules of intellecual discourse.

    • CommentRowNumber14.
    • CommentAuthorUrs
    • CommentTimeJul 9th 2012

    there is a world of difference between a homotopy colimit of lax structures and a strict colimit

    Lurie’s result is about strict (1-categorical) colimits. That’s the point.

    • CommentRowNumber15.
    • CommentAuthorTim_Porter
    • CommentTimeJul 9th 2012
    • (edited Jul 9th 2012)

    I think the basic disagreement is what constitutes a higher vKT. Lurie’s result could equally well be called the homotopy small simplex theorem (a good name) or the simplicial approximation theorem, (:-)), which would be a good name if it had not already been used somewhere else! What’s in a name… except the point of the difference in interpretation can be important. (I should point out that there are other vKTs around, for instance, Artin and Mazur had a paper in Topology in about 1970 with van Kampen in the title. How does that fit in?)

    What I am interested in is not so much the name but what can be derived from these results. I know that the truncations are left adjoints (at the suitable n-level) but then calculations in Ronnie’s various vKTs gives strict colimits not homotopy colimits and the universal property in Lurie’s statement is a homotopy colimit even if the construction is a colimit (???) May be I am being thick, but I still feel that we have two different threads of development here.

    An example of where Lurie’s result does not seem to give very much information is in applications of these sort of ideas to the work on higher generation of groups (Abels and Holz) and more recently on complexes of groups. There the local information is partial giving a bit of a resolution of a group and the nerve of the indexing category is what glues things together. The various parts are constructed via combinatorial methods and the homological group theorist hopes to gain information on the resulting colimit or homotopy colimit, comparing it with resolutions of the big group. You do not use the singular complex here, rather it is CW-complex techniques that count, and that is more combinatorial and infinity groupoidal in nature.

    There may be a gap in the developed theory, namely the study of the combinatorial / algebraic / categorical models within a homotopy type. At a naive level, looking at the models e.g. crossed complex ones, of some homotopy type represented by a CW-complex and now performing subdivisions on the complex structure. I do not know of much work in this area. It would be relevant for my work in HQFTs so if someone knows something on this please tell me.

    • CommentRowNumber16.
    • CommentAuthorronniegpd
    • CommentTimeJul 9th 2012
    @Urs Never mind the word "ridiculous", I have told you I find it at least strange: it seems to assume progress is made by a rename, and it is not something I would do. Again, just calling a result a "Seifert-van Kampen Theorem" does not _necessarily_ make it a generalisation of previous work called by that name. _Detailed_ proofs are needed.

    The really classical SvKT is stated by Lurie: it is about pushouts of fundamental groups of spaces with base points, and has a connectivity condition. The most general version on the fundamental groupoid with a set of base points is in the paper

    (with A. RAZAK), ``A van Kampen theorem for unions of non-connected spaces'', _Archiv. Math._ 42 (1984) 85-88.

    and has a connectivity condition on 3-fold intersections. If you want to convince an old man, Urs, you will have to write out a full proof! (Why the condition on 3-fold intersections? I have an idea on this, but I'll leave it to you.)

    You mention "the fundamental 2-groupoid". What is it? Of what? Is it a strict structure? Does it involve relative homotopy groups? I need details!!
    • CommentRowNumber17.
    • CommentAuthorDavidRoberts
    • CommentTimeJul 9th 2012

    @Urs, appendices: A1 vs A3

    ah, I see. I was thinking that the stratified space stuff linked in with Ronnie’s work on filtered spaces and strict models associated to them. Perhaps a groupoid version does, and would be interesting for further discussion at some other time.

    • CommentRowNumber18.
    • CommentAuthorTim_Porter
    • CommentTimeJul 9th 2012

    It is interesting to follow through in Spanier to see where he uses his small simplices argument. it is (p.188) in a proof of excision and is related to Mayer-Vietoris.

    • CommentRowNumber19.
    • CommentAuthorronniegpd
    • CommentTimeJul 9th 2012
    Regarding the small simplex argument, I liked the method in

    Sch{\"o}n, R. Acyclic models and excision. Proc. Amer. Math. Soc.59~(1) (1976) 167--168.

    and made use of this argument in 10.4.20 of "Nonabelian algebraic topology" which shows that the inclusion of the singular simplicial complex with U-small simplices into the full singular complex is a homotopy equivalence. The book makes no claim that this subsumes the arguments for the Higher Homotopy Seifert-van Kampen Theorem. As Tim suggests, the result is reasonably called "excision", and is not a HHSvKT type of result.

    A quick glance at A1 and A3 of the Lurie book has not revealed to me any relative homotopy groups! So far, it seems unlikely that his result has much to do with the 2-d van Kampen theorem of Brown and Higgins. I await further developments.

    In all these "true" HHSvKTs, inductive arguments play a key role, as expected because of the connectivity conditions, which are used inductively.
    • CommentRowNumber20.
    • CommentAuthorronniegpd
    • CommentTimeJul 9th 2012
    @Urs : with regard to the use of the term "ridiculous", Harry was, as a young chap in the area, essentially asking for the justification of the use of this term; since this forum is a place for discussion, it would be useful to have the justification at least outlined. As an old hand, I am somewhat cynical, I fear.
    • CommentRowNumber21.
    • CommentAuthorDavidRoberts
    • CommentTimeJul 9th 2012

    I feel there is a different aspect coming out in the old nice objects vs nice category dichotomy, namely strictness. The homotopy category is defined a priori in terms of topological spaces, or even CW complexes, and Quillen tells us that simplicial sets do the job too. The latter are a topos so form a nice category, whereas the CW complexes are nice objects, but form a category that is not up to scratch for high-powered category theory. However, we can trade off some of the ’badness’ of the category of CW complexes and keep the geometric combinatorial structure in passing to for example the category of crossed complexes, but lose homotopical information. The category of crossed complexes is very nice (aren’t they models of a finite limit sketch?) and the objects are very nice indeed, being algebro-combinatoric in nature. More importantly, we find that we retain some information that is lost in merely passing to e.g. homotopy groups.

    There is an n-category cafe posting discussing the relative merits of algebraic vs ’geometric’ (or non-algebraic) definitions of homotopy types and the homotopy hypothesis, and simplicial sets (or Kan complexes) fall exactly in the middle of the spectrum presented here. I can’t find it at the moment (this and this are similar), but there was discussion involving Nikolaus’ algebraic Kan complexes as falling on the slightly algebraic side, and the various ’exist a filler with contractible space of choices’ versions on the non-algebraic side.

    There was a tongue-in-cheek remark that if one defines a space as a Kan complex and an \infty-groupoid as a Kan complex, then the homotopy hypothesis is trivial, if that helps anyone else find it…

    • CommentRowNumber22.
    • CommentAuthorDavidRoberts
    • CommentTimeJul 9th 2012

    Ah, this is it, with comments by Urs and others on considering simplicial sets/Kan complexes as higher categories/groupoids starting at this comment. I guess this may be why Urs doesn’t feel like debating this again, as he has done so at length in the past.

    • CommentRowNumber23.
    • CommentAuthorronniegpd
    • CommentTimeJul 9th 2012
    @David Thanks for those nice links, and I was not aware of the Nickolaus preprint.

    @Urs It is interesting how different my own route was, since I wanted a strict generalisation of the fundamental groupoid, in order to express the concepts of

    (i) algebraic inverse to subdivision,

    (ii) commutative cubes,

    (iii) higher dimensional group theory (rather than category theory).
    It took nine years to realise I was barking up the wrong tree to try to do this by working with one space, and find first in 1974 that we could make strong progress in dimension 2 with pairs of spaces, and later in all dimensions with filtered spaces, using cubical methods, and quite novel kinds of proofs. Then came work with n-cubes of spaces, and quite different proofs. None of these proof methods (nor the results?) have been absorbed into higher category theory, as far as I can see,

    So I feel we should all accept that these aims are different from those of higher category theorists, that their work on higher categories is distinct from that with which I have been involved, and that this other work does not generalise that of mine and my collaborators. In particular what Simmons and Lurie call a higher Siefert-van Kampen theorem has much in common with classical arguments on U-small simplices, where U is an open cover, and in fact does not overlap with my work with Higgins and with Loday.

    I would hope to get on with editing the nlab pages on higher van Kampen theorems in these terms.

    What I still find very odd is that it is commonly accepted that the fundamental groupoid of a space is a strict structure, and yet is called the fundamental infinity groupoid of a space is lax in all dimensions > 0, and so not a generalisation of the classical fundamental groupoid. However, as the two subjects are distinct, or so it seems, that is not my problem.

    Any questions or comments?
    • CommentRowNumber24.
    • CommentAuthorUrs
    • CommentTimeJul 10th 2012

    Danny Stevenson kindly provided further references, which I have added here.

    • CommentRowNumber25.
    • CommentAuthorronniegpd
    • CommentTimeJul 10th 2012
    Thanks- I'l follow these up.

    It all shows the power and importance of a name - as the bard wrote: " to give to airy nothing, // A local habitation and a name." For the progress of science, these should names be chosen with due consideration. Thus it seems Urs was convinced that the result quoted was a generalisation, simply by the utilisation of the name.

    Again, one would think that the fundamental oo-groupoid of a space would generalise the classical fundamental groupoid, but of course it does not, it generalises the path space and a family of homotopies.

    One would think that a "higher order Seifert van Kampen theorem" would generalise previous published versions of such a theorem, but as we have seen, some of them do not, and certainly make no effort at what should be standard good practice, namely to discuss the possible relationships. Indeed they seem to fail to refer to these results. Why is that?

    By failing to do so, the workers may be missing important points. For all I know, a key concept might be a filtered topos.

    Why do the results in which I have been involved lead to explicit calculations of known, nonabelian, invariants, e.g. second relative homotopy groups, and n-adic homotopy groups, and these other theorems are not shown to lead to explicit calculations?

    I only ask because I want to know. That is how science progresses.
    • CommentRowNumber26.
    • CommentAuthorTim_Porter
    • CommentTimeJul 10th 2012

    @Ronnie: Can you add in the reference to the vKT for cat^n groups? I think it is important because it leads to new tensor product type constructions as well as the possibility of calculation. I could add this but you probably have some pre-existing text that can be adapted.

    The debate above suggests that the entry on higher vKTs really needs splitting into the topological singular simplex version and the Generalised vKTs of Ronnie and Phil Higgins, and Ronnie and Loday. Perhaps the topological version then needs a discussion on its origins (small simplices, classical chain equivalence results as in Spanier etc.Does any one know the origin of that small simplices results, e.g. is it Mayer-Vietoris, excision or where? I ask because to show the continuity of the modern result with its classical antecedents puts the modern theory in context.)

    • CommentRowNumber27.
    • CommentAuthorHarry Gindi
    • CommentTimeJul 10th 2012

    @Ronnie: The Batanin-Leinster or Grothendieck-Maltsiniotis fundamental \infty-groupoid is indeed a generalization of the fundamental 11-groupoid. The strictness of the fundamental 11-groupoid comes not from the “fundamental groupoid” part of the functor, but instead from the collapse functor.

    • CommentRowNumber28.
    • CommentAuthorronniegpd
    • CommentTimeJul 10th 2012
    • (edited Jul 10th 2012)
    I put some references in the recent note

    pages.bangor.ac.uk/~mas010/pdffiles/appHvKT.pdf

    but could put the contents of that here if needed. Comments welcome. It is available from the Higher dimensional group theory page.

    I agree with Tim that one needs words such as "lax HHSvKT" and "strict HHSvKT" but that does not point the lax ones at the small simplex argument, which they are properly related to.

    What is needed also is more on the use of cat$^n$-groups and their relation to n-ad homotopy groups; triad homotopy groups were invented to measure the failure of excision, which explains the title of

    42. R. Brown and J.-L. Loday, ``Excision homotopique en basse dimension'', C.R. Acad. Sci. Paris S\'er. I 298 (1984) 353-356. (pdf on my pub list).

    The small simplex argument is used as one step on the way to excision and Mayer-Vietoris.
    • CommentRowNumber29.
    • CommentAuthorUrs
    • CommentTimeJul 10th 2012
    • (edited Jul 10th 2012)

    By the way, if I am seeing correctly then the section “A.3 Seifert-van Kampen Theorem” in Higher Algebra was replaced by a new version just today, pp. 845.

    • CommentRowNumber30.
    • CommentAuthorronniegpd
    • CommentTimeJul 11th 2012
    • (edited Jul 11th 2012)
    @Harry Can they accommodate the fundamental groupoid on a set of base points? It took me a few months in 1965 to see that one needed 2 base points for the circle, rather than the whole fundamental groupoid, and then to move to a set of base points. That was 47 years ago.

    And then can they move to relative homotopy groups, as modules over a fundamental groupoid on a set of base points? Then they are moving to the filtered situation!

    Who has studied the proof of our construction of the strict cubical homotopy groupoid of a filtered space, and seen how the filtration has just the right structure to make it work, with no room to spare? All this expresses well my original intuitions (1965) about generalisations of the proof of the classical SvKT, and hence I find all this other stuff claiming to be a generalisation ...., well not to my taste. I guess I am not a "modern homotopy theorist", because of my links to the past as an ex student of JHCW, and MGB.
    • CommentRowNumber31.
    • CommentAuthorDavidRoberts
    • CommentTimeJul 11th 2012
    • (edited Jul 11th 2012)

    @Ronnie,

    such a construction (fundamental groupoid on basepoints), can be seen as as pullback of codisc({basepoints})codisc(X)codisc(\{basepoints\})\hookrightarrow codisc(X) and Π 1(X)codisc(X)\Pi_1(X) \to codisc(X) where codisccodisc denotes the codiscrete or banal groupoid. This is what is also known as an induced groupoid along the inclusion, or, as I prefer to call it, the base change along the inclusion.

    There are higher groupoid versions of this, which arise from the n-ary factorisation system on (n+1)-groupoids (essentially the Postnikov-Moore tower), together with (Grothendieck) fibration-like lifting properties, and this would help, I imagine, to express relative homotopy (n-)groupoids. I should write down a version of the above for the triple X 0X 1XX_0 \subset X_1 \subset X and the fundamental bi-/2-groupoid - I’ve thought about this before, but not finished it off. (In fact I was trying to construct a span of weak equivalences of topological bigroupoids between the topological Hardie-Kamps-Kieboom-Stevenson fundamental bigroupoid and a suitably topologised version of the fundamental strict 2-groupoid, both of a CW complex with its usual filtration. Never quite finished it off…)


    Later:

    ok, here are some sketch details. Let X 0X 1XX_0 \subset X_1 \subset X be a filtered space, and (A,B) (I,e)(A,B)^{(I,e)} be the relative path space where the set e={0,1}e = \{0,1\} is mapped into the subspace BAB \subset A. Then let codisc 2((A,B) (I,e)B)codisc_2((A,B)^{(I,e)} \rightrightarrows B) be the groupoid with object set BB, arrow set (A,B) (I,e)(A,B)^{(I,e)} and a unique 2-arrow between any two parallel 1-arrows, and codisc 2(Π 1(A,B))codisc_2(\Pi_1(A,B)) be the analogous construction but for the relative fundamental groupoid. Let Π 2(X)\Pi_2(X) be the fundamental bigroupoid of the space XX (forgetting filtered structure) and Π 2(X) strict\Pi_2(X)_{strict} be a fundamental 2-groupoid, when this can be done (e.g. Hardie-Kamps-Kieboom give one in the first paper on this). There is a 2-functor Π 2(X)codisc 2((X,X) (I,e)X)\Pi_2(X) \to codisc_2((X,X)^{(I,e)} \rightrightarrows X) (analogously for the strict case, which I will leave implicit), and also a 2-functor codisc 2((X 1,X 0) (I,e)X 0)codisc 2((X,X) (I,e)X) codisc_2((X_1,X_0)^{(I,e)} \rightrightarrows X_0) \to codisc_2((X,X)^{(I,e)} \rightrightarrows X). The (strict!) pullback of these two 2-functors gives a fundamental bi-/2-groupoid Π 2(X,X 1,X 0)\Pi_2(X,X_1,X_0) for the filtered space

    [I’ve squashed some steps together in the above paragraph, so it doesn’t generalise cleanly in the form given, but it should be possibly to do an inductive construction, working up from the objects, using the n-ary factorisation system as I said above.]

    Given a CW complex with its usual filtration in the bottom dimensions we can take the weak version and I think strictify it by identifying paths which are homotopic inside X 1X_1. I’m not 100% sure how to describe this in an abstract way (yet), but it would probably involve the coequifier of a pair of natural transformations between Π 2(X 1,X 1,X 0)Π 2(X,X 1,X 0)\Pi_2(X_1,X_1,X_0) \rightrightarrows \Pi_2(X,X_1,X_0). (This sort of construction one would do inductively from the top-dimensional arrows down if trying to generalise to higher dimensions.)

    Apart from that, all of the above internalises nicely to TopTop (DiffDiff) once we have topological (smooth) fundamental bi-/2-groupoids, since we are only talking about finite limits (and in the manifold case we find we have submersions where necessary).

    Ideally, one should be able to write this down in a model-independent way, so that given a definition of weak nn-/\infty-groupoid we can form these pullbacks and weighted nn-colimits using abstract nonsense to get the result.

    Calculations on the other hand…

    • CommentRowNumber32.
    • CommentAuthorDavidRoberts
    • CommentTimeJul 11th 2012

    Hi Ronnie, more discussion at the Cafe you might like to read. Anyway, you can see we’ve been over this ground a lot. The best is to extract actual mathematics from the discussion, rather than get mired in details like ’what is a good model of an \infty-groupoid?’ based on vague (or even not so vague) desiderata for such a theory.

    • CommentRowNumber33.
    • CommentAuthorronniegpd
    • CommentTimeJul 11th 2012
    Hi David: I've glanced at the discussion you link to.

    I've always gone for cubical models, because of their ability to handle "algebraic inverses to subdivision", an essential ingredient of the work with Philip Higgins, but very difficult, it seems, in globular or simplicial methods. In papers published in 1981 we show the relation with the globular theory (maybe the first statement of the notion of globular set?), give a purely algebraic version of the theory, and relate with the Kan filler conditions. Are these considered in the discussion?

    Re the SvKT, the purpose of introducing the fundamental groupoid on a set of base points was to get one theorem which included the determination of fundamental group of the circle, THE basic example in topology. The higher SvKT with Higgins also calculated the n-th homotopy group of the n-sphere, and much more. The work with Loday proved an n-ad connectivity theorem and determined precisely the critical, usually nonabelian, group. This is the kind of work I would like to see higher homotopy groupoids actually do. Regard them as test properties.

    More later, I need some breakfast.
    • CommentRowNumber34.
    • CommentAuthorUrs
    • CommentTimeJul 11th 2012
    • (edited Jul 11th 2012)

    I only just catch this here from #25, as I have not been following all exchanges:

    Thus it seems Urs was convinced that the result quoted was a generalisation, simply by the utilisation of the name.

    No. Instead I read the result and its proof, understood it, compared it to other things that I understand, and drew a conclusion. That’s how I usually do math, I hope: not by agenda but by understanding.

    Generally: I find this entire discussion here would benefit from moving away from discussion of tastes, feelings and insinuations and instead sticking strictly to the math.

    • CommentRowNumber35.
    • CommentAuthorronniegpd
    • CommentTimeJul 11th 2012
    • (edited Jul 11th 2012)
    @Urs: Fair comment. I really did want to know how the Lurie result stated was a generalisation of the Brown-Higgins result, i.e. how one deduced the latter from the former. Do you agree with the distinction between the results? They both may be called "local-to-global".
    • CommentRowNumber36.
    • CommentAuthorDavidRoberts
    • CommentTimeJul 11th 2012

    I think I’ll try computing Π 2(S 2)\Pi_2(S^2) using the filtration S 0S 1S 2S^0 \subset S^1 \subset S^2 (east and west ’poles’ and equator), my construction above, and the coequaliser S 1D 2S 2S^1 \rightrightarrows D^2 \to S^2, just as an exercise…

    • CommentRowNumber37.
    • CommentAuthorronniegpd
    • CommentTimeJul 11th 2012
    • (edited Jul 11th 2012)
    In my seminar in Chicago in April (see my preprint page) I listed some

    Anomalies in algebraic topology:

    1. The fundamental group is essentially nonabelian, but homology and higher homotopy groups are abelian.
    2. The traditional van Kampen Theorem does not compute the fundamental group of the circle, THE basic example in the subject.
    3. For the standard diagram of the Klein bottle we cannot in traditional theory write down $\partial (\sigma)= a+b -a+b ,$ but write instead $\partial(\sigma)=2b$, losing information.

    To resolve the last anomaly we need Whitehead's notion of free crossed module, and his Theorem on free crossed modules.

    Recovering Whitehead's theorem was a key aim of the work with Higgins. But Whitehead's theorem is about relative homotopy groups. We were thus led to consider a theory for pairs, which worked just great, granted previous work with Chris Spencer. In particular, we gave (1978 paper) a vast generalisation of Whitehead's Theorem, whose original proof was quite subtle, using knot theory and transversality. So I expect a lot from something apparently claiming from it's name to be a HHSvKT.
    • CommentRowNumber38.
    • CommentAuthorronniegpd
    • CommentTimeJul 11th 2012
    @Urs: I have asked for the mathematical reasons for your saying Lurie's result was a generalisation of the Brown-Higgins result, i.e. how the latter can be deduced from the former. I don't see it myself. The connectivity conditions in the latter result are usually used in an inductive manner, and the methods use some subtle cubical results, and methods such as collapsing, due to Whitehead. I would be interested to see other methods of proof, even say of Whitehead's theorem.
    • CommentRowNumber39.
    • CommentAuthorMike Shulman
    • CommentTimeJul 11th 2012
    • (edited Jul 11th 2012)

    A lot of this discussion seems too confrontational to me. Sometimes one wants tools that are well-adapted for concrete calculations. Other times one wants tools to prove general abstract theorems. Sometimes abstract theorems yield concrete calculations or suggest calculations that one should do; other times concrete calculations point the way towards new abstract theorems. Some of us are more interested in, or better at, one side of the coin; others prefer the other side. I’m sure we all know this.

    It seems to me that we are probably looking at multiple different ways to generalize the classical VKT which are not reducible to each other (at least, not obviously). One generalization that is more 1-categorical may be more useful for computations; another, more, nn-categorical one may be more useful for abstract purposes.

    Can I put in a request, though, that the word “lax” be reserved for structure that is preserved up to a not-necessarily-invertible transformation, as is now standard in category theory, with “weak” or “pseudo” used when the transformation is invertible? (Which seems to be the situation being considered here, is that right?)

    • CommentRowNumber40.
    • CommentAuthorronniegpd
    • CommentTimeJul 11th 2012
    @Urs: re 29. I have downloaded the new version of the Lurie book, thanks for that, but the appropriate section, now A.3, does not, at a glance, seem much changed. In particular, it does not show that the pushout theorem for the fundamental groups stated at the beginning of Section A.3 follows from Theorem A.3.1. The proof of that Theorem uses Lemma A.3.3 which I think is related to the result in Spanier on U-small simplices, which is one way of proving excision for homology, and obtaining the Mayer-Vietoris sequence. A similar statement is to this Lemma is Theorem 10.4.20 of our book on "Nonabelan algebraic topology" (though the acyclic model argument does use some freeness properties which are deduced from the HHSvKT!). In fact Theorem A.3.1 is more general, in that it involves a functor from a category to the category of open sets, and homotopy colimits.

    I can't see any relationship of Section A.3 to the work of Brown-Higgins, where the main HHSvKT does have the old one for the fundamental groupoid on a set of base points as a special case. That HHSvKT also implies Whitehead's theorem on free crossed modules, yields many new calculations of nonabelian second relative homotopy groups, and hence of homotopy 2-types, and implies by a quite simple argument, the Relative Hurewicz Theorem.

    I'll try to make this clear in a revision of the nlab page. I'd be glad to have your comments.

    Our concern should also be that the use of the same name for theorems which are essentially distinct is likely to lead to confusion, particularly for students, and may lead to missed lines of research.
    • CommentRowNumber41.
    • CommentAuthorTim_Porter
    • CommentTimeJul 12th 2012
    • (edited Jul 12th 2012)

    About Lurie’s Higher algebra. The date on the frontpage of it gives May 18, 2011? Is this a new version?

    I think that the relationships between the Lurie result and the generalised vKTs of Ronnie et al could do with being made precise. As Ronnie says Lurie’s statement is closely related to the result in RB-PJH-RS’s book on page 363. There are a whole lot of related results (excision, Mayer-Vietoris, vKTs, small simplices) and perhaps some clarification is needed (not just in the nLab!) on the precise relationship between all the various named forms. I do think that the present situation could be confusing for a beginner.

    • CommentRowNumber42.
    • CommentAuthorDavid_Corfield
    • CommentTimeJul 12th 2012

    Re #39, Mike’s subtle account of possible interrelations between more abstract and more computational approaches puts me in mind of Hilbert and Gordan on invariant theory. If you haven’t done so already, I thoroughly recommend that you have your preconceptions about that episode blown out of the water by reading Colin McLarty’s Theology and its discontents: David Hilbert’s foundation myth for modern mathematics.

    • CommentRowNumber43.
    • CommentAuthorronniegpd
    • CommentTimeJul 12th 2012
    • (edited Jul 12th 2012)
    I wish someone would explain to me how the theorem of Lurie stated in his section entitled "The Seifert-van Kampen Theorem" does actually imply the usual pushout form of the theorem for the fundamental group, and preferably also the form given in

    (with A. RAZAK), ``A van Kampen theorem for unions of non-connected spaces'', Archiv. Math. 42 (1984) 85-88.

    which deals with general open covers, strict colimits, a set $A$ of base points, and has a condition that the set $A$ meets each path component of the 1-2-,3-fold intersections of sets of the cover. (A proof for a corresponding result but with one base point is in Hatcher's book.) One possibility is that these connectivity conditions arise in the relation between homotopy and strict colimits. But it needs explanation for someone like me, and for students.


    I would also like to emphasise that the first aim of the work with Higgins was to develop the tools to express in all dimensions a generalisation of Crowell's proof in his classic paper on the van Kampen Theorem. The intuitions for this are explained in the early pages of our new book. As I have expressed elsewhere, it was "an idea of a proof in search of a theorem". Loday and I were not able to write down an analogous proof for our conjectured triadic van Kampen theorem, hence the published proof, an inductive procedure.

    Another intuition is that in homotopy theory, identifications in low dimensions change high dimensional homotopy invariants. To cope with this in a gluing (colimit) theorem, you need algebraic structures with structure in a range of dimensions.

    As has been said above, there are arguments about what is an "algebraic structure" in theories of weak higher categories. For our purposes, we wanted strict colimits and therefore strict algebraic structures, to obtain clear calculations. (It occurs to me, that if higher category theory is to be related to physics, and so to experiment, then at some stage you need clear calculations, to avoid the "Not even wrong!" argument. How forceful is that point?) Constructing such strict higher categorical homotopical invariants for filtered spaces or n-cubes of spaces is non trivial.

    When I visited Grothendieck he drove me to Montpellier where I was to give a talk (foolishly, I gave the wrong talk, but never mind) and when we finally got there, with me going on about double groupoids during the 2 hour journey, and he driving fast along back roads (not touching motorways, of course) he asked: "Are you telling me that n-fold groupoids model homotopy n-types?" "Yes." "I suppose you have written this somewhere in your letters?" "Yes: it is a theorem of Loday." "But that is absolutely beautiful!"

    It is curious fact that the cubical models work well as strict structures. An algebraic topologist complained to me that these models seem rather "floppy". Simona Paoli has investigated how moving to less "floppy" structures leads to weak structures. It all needs lots of clear discussion of pros and cons, in terms of what has actually been proved.

    If these discussions seem confrontational, it may be because I keep asking questions of the type "Why is theorem A a generalisation of theorem B?" (see for example my question at the start of this comment) and not getting a mathematical answer!

    I would be happy to repeat that question on mathoverflow. Why not? Or the ncatcafe?
    • CommentRowNumber44.
    • CommentAuthorMarc Hoyois
    • CommentTimeJul 12th 2012

    Here’s an attempt to deduce the usual SvKT from Lurie’s A.3.1:

    Take 𝒞\mathcal{C} to consist of three objects, corresponding to the open sets UU, VV, and their intersection UVU\cap V. The condition (*) of the theorem is equivalent to X=UVX=U\cup V. The conclusion of the theorem says that the \infty-groupoid Sing(X)Sing(X) is the homotopy pushout of Sing(U)Sing(U) and Sing(V)Sing(V) along Sing(UV)Sing(U\cap V). Now, apply the 1-truncation functor which is left adjoint to the inclusion of 1-groupoids into \infty-groupoids. Note that the 1-truncation of Sing(X)Sing(X) is the fundamental groupoid Π 1(X)\Pi_1(X) of XX. Thus we obtain that Π 1(X)\Pi_1(X) is the 2-pushout of Π 1(U)\Pi_1(U) and Π 1(V)\Pi_1(V) along Π 1(UV)\Pi_1(U\cap V). In fact this 2-colimit is a strict colimit, because the maps we’re taking the pushout of are injective on objects. So this recovers the classical SvKT as well as computes Π 1(S 1)\Pi_1(S^1).

    If you have a cover of XX by arbitrarily many open sets, you can take 𝒞\mathcal{C} to be the diagram of all finite intersections. In this case (*) holds because the fibers 𝒞 x\mathcal{C}_x are nonempty co-filtered posets, and you get the same result (again the 2-colimit is strict, because for any open UU, the map from the strict colimit of all Π 1(V)\Pi_1(V), VUV \subsetneq U, to Π 1(U)\Pi_1(U) is injective on objects).

    Given a set of base points AA, you can base change the whole situation to AA. Base change preserves homotopy colimits so you get Π 1(X;A)\Pi_1(X;A) as a (strict) 2-colimit of groupoids. It doesn’t seem like we need AA to intersect anything.

    • CommentRowNumber45.
    • CommentAuthorMike Shulman
    • CommentTimeJul 12th 2012

    Ronnie, I think your question is entirely justified (and I think Marc has just given an excellent answer). But I did feel that some of your comments sounded disparaging towards abstract theorems that are not directly calculationally useful (just as some other remarks seemed unjustifiably dismissive of your question). If that was not your intent, I apologize.

    • CommentRowNumber46.
    • CommentAuthorronniegpd
    • CommentTimeJul 12th 2012
    • (edited Jul 12th 2012)
    @Marc: Thanks for your comment. One of the facts needing to be taken into consideration is that the inclusion H \to G of a full subgroupoid is a homotopy equivalence if and only if H meets each component of G. So we need the condition that A meets each path component of ... . So we should be able to move from the whole groupoids to the full subgroupoids to calculate the homotopy colimit, provided .... Also the 3-fold intersection condition is necessary, it can't be reduced to 2, see, probably, an example in Hatcher. So what is going on? I confess not being so adept at 2-colimits!

    @Mike: It is partly a case of "chacun a son gout!". (To say nothing of horses for courses.) My education is from algebraic topology, and group theory, and in my thesis I was quite pleased that a particular question of an extension of Z_2 by Z-2 could be settled, by what was a general theorem. (The extension came in the Barratt track group sequence for maps from a suspension of a projective plane to itself.) There are theorems in algebraic topology of the type that something one can't compute is equivalent to something else one can't compute (e.g. a spectral sequence converging to homotopy groups whose E_2 term is more or less uncomputable.) So for any theorem it is interesting to analyse what it can and cannot do. That way one might make progress.

    I also developed in my thesis the category of Hausdorff k-spaces, which was adequate and convenient, as I explained in my first paper, but not directly computational. My papers on topological groupoids are not directly computational.

    Sometimes to do the sums you have to break symmetry; for example, to compute resolutions of a group G you can try to construct the universal cover of a K(G,1) with its contracting homotopy. (See work of Graham Ellis.) Such a contracting homotopy necessarily "breaks symmetry", and involves choices. So here, abstract homotopy theory is not so useful.

    You may have noted that in our new book there is an Appendix section on fibrations and cofibrations of categories. It does give a framework for many examples used in the book.

    I felt that my attitudes to general theories and specific calculations were shared by Philip Higgins and Ali Frohlich, but not by all. You should have seen Frank Adam's face as I gave a seminar at Manchester on fibrations of groupoids, round about 1970. (He was horrified, while Michael Barratt said it was beautiful.)

    Also part of my remarks were towards the question: if, as claimed, Theorem A is a generalisation of Theorem B, and Theorem B implies some specific calculations, then how does Theorem A imply the same calculations? This is called probing, and is all part of the (or at least my) methodology of research. So it was claimed on the ncatlab that a theorem of Lurie called a Seifert-van Kampen Theorem "restricted to" the similarly named theorem I proved with Higgins. Hence the probing!

    Hope that helps.
    • CommentRowNumber47.
    • CommentAuthorronniegpd
    • CommentTimeJul 13th 2012
    @Marc: "It doesn't seem like we need A to intersect anything." There must be some condition on A meeting path components. The classic van Kampen Theorem as stated does not compute the fundamental group of the circle. This situation was rectified in my paper published 45 years ago

    8. ``Groupoids and Van Kampen's theorem'', Proc. London Math. Soc. (3) 17 (1967) 385-401.

    It is interesting if such a van Kampen theorem does follow from a U-small (or excision) type theorem, but this seems still a long way from even the 2-d theorem.

    @Mike: It is useful, even necessary for progress, to assess what theorems can or (apparently) cannot do. I am well aware of the limitations in the applications of the HHSvKTs I have been involved in; on the other hand, they do determine things not possible by other means. I would expect work on extensions of van Kampen theorems to certain types of topoi to make such detailed comparisons.

    Another question is how far do these results move towards the nonabelian cohomology of topoi, as sought by Grothendieck?

    I first investigated extensions of the vKT using nonabelian cohomology, and then was surprised to find that the groupoid result I could obtain was easier to prove and more powerful.



    Probably I am not the right person to rewrite the ncat lab page, as probably viewed as partial. I hope someone else will correct it.
    • CommentRowNumber48.
    • CommentAuthorMarc Hoyois
    • CommentTimeJul 13th 2012

    @Ronnie: The last part of my post about “base change” is indeed nonsense! But at least I hope I’ve shown that the classical SvKT at the beginning of Lurie’s A.3 follows from his “more general” theorem, as does the computation of Π 1(S 1)\Pi_1(S^1).

    What I can say for sure is that the additional conditions when there is a set of base points X\neq X have nothing to do with the relation between strict and 2-colimits: the strict colimit will always be a 2-colimit for the reason I gave in #44. I would guess that the condition on 3-fold intersections has to do with the 1 in Π 1\Pi_1; for Π 2\Pi_2 there would be a condition on 4-fold intersections, etc.

    • CommentRowNumber49.
    • CommentAuthorronniegpd
    • CommentTimeJul 13th 2012
    • (edited Jul 13th 2012)
    @Marc: I do expect the SvKT with a set of base points can be deduced from Lurie's statement, but it really is his job to show how (as well as relate it to the most general form, IMHO). As you say the number 3 is related to 1: in my proof with Razak, it refers to the Lebesgue covering dimension of the plane (essentially as in Hatcher).

    So if the condition can't be brought into your sketch proof, then something is awry! My expectation is that it involves the relation between the space and the nerve of the cover: the paper

    @article{RazakSallehTaylor1,
    author = "{A}. {Razak Salleh} and {J}. {T}aylor",
    title = "On the Relation Between the Fundamental Groupoids of the
    Classifying Space and the Nerve of an Open Cover",
    journal = "J. Pure Appl. Alg.",
    volume = 37,
    year = 1985,
    pages = "81-93"
    }

    should help, according to my memory. I don't have a pdf of it though.
    • CommentRowNumber50.
    • CommentAuthorMike Shulman
    • CommentTimeJul 13th 2012

    Of course, it is important to find out what a given theorem can and cannot do! But I do think that it is unnecessarily confrontational to assert that when someone proves a theorem with one purpose in mind, it is “his job” to figure out how that theorem relates to other theorems that other people have proven with other purposes in mind. Certainly, someone should do it, but everyone is busy. It seems to me that often this sort of thing only gets done when someone else comes along and needs it for something (or is just curious enough, or bored enough, to put in the work).

    • CommentRowNumber51.
    • CommentAuthorronniegpd
    • CommentTimeJul 13th 2012
    • (edited Jul 13th 2012)
    @MIke: Yours is a good general point, particularly the one about people being busy. But the words "relates to a theorem" do not mean the same as "is a generalisation of a theorem", and if I were to make such a statement then I would feel obligated to explain/prove it. There seems still to be a doubt in that direction.

    If you look at our new book, you will also see that we have made an effort to relate the work to the (rather large) literature. I like to know the origins of ideas, and also to examine those origins to see if something has been missed. I hope this attempt at scholarship will prove useful, and also give due honour to earlier workers.

    The current statement on the nlab under "higher+homotopy+van+Kampen+theorem" is "The following is a version of the above general statement restricted to a strict ∞-groupoid-version of the fundamental ∞-groupoid and applicable for topological spaces that are equipped with the extra structure of a filtered topological space." and I have been trying to find out what that means, particularly "is a version of". I told Urs (as the last editor) I was proposing to rewrite this, and he suggested it needed discussion on the nforum (I'll omit what else he wrote). Part of the confusion is that the usual fundamental oo-groupoid is just another name for the simplicial singular complex, and so does not generalise the standard fundamental groupoid.

    So the theorems may be related in spirit (local-to-global); there is the common name (SvKT); and the common term "oo-groupoid" but with different meaning; and there is no proof (at present) that the Lurie statement implies the result on filtered spaces. I would be interested to see if the deduction can be made.
    • CommentRowNumber52.
    • CommentAuthorTim_Porter
    • CommentTimeJul 14th 2012

    I am wondering if there is not a need for a ‘local-to-global’ entry that chats about the general SvKT and the small simplex theorem (both the classical one for (co)homology / chain complexes and various of the others (i.e. homotopy results) including Lurie’s) and then links to descent.

    Another terminological suggestion is that the Lurie’s result be called the homotopy SvKT /homotopy small simplex theorem, whilst the various versions of the vKT due to Ronnie are called the strict generalised vKTs. I know Ronnie likes to call the Brown-Higgins results the higher homotopy vKT but there is also the Brown-Loday generalised vKTs for the n-types. The specific versions can then be referred to as the crossed complex vKT etc.

    One key point, if I remember rightly, of the proof of Ronnie’s crossed complex vKT is the fibration theorem which relates the filtered space singular complex to the corresponding omega-groupoid. The crossed complex model is more-or-less a quotient of the singular complex model with nice conditions on the filtration giving nice properties on the quotient map.This suggests that the use of thin element structures in this context is the key to understanding the relationship between the two types of result. I have not thought out how this might manifest itself in the Brown-Loday case, but my intuition is that this may be worth doing, i.e. that analysing the relationship between the weak infinity-groupoid models of a homotopy type and the various strict models of the n-type, the crossed complex models, and so on, then applying the resulting ‘machine’ to homotopy colimit result of Lurie, after first restricting via pullback etc to the filtered case.

    That idea relates in turn to various points about the intermediate models, e.g. we have not got a vKT for 2-crossed complexes and that might be useful for various calculations. I must stop now, but if no one objects or has a better suggestion i will try to start reorganising things along the lines I suggest in the next few days.

    • CommentRowNumber53.
    • CommentAuthorronniegpd
    • CommentTimeJul 14th 2012
    • (edited Jul 14th 2012)
    @Tim: Excellent idea! I first heard of the term "local-to-global" from Dick Swan in 1958, and he mentioned sheaves and spectral sequences as two tools for this. In Atiyah's article on 20th century mathematics he mentions that theme, and also commutative to noncommutative, higher dimensions, and the unification of mathematics. (The words category, groupoid, do not occur in the article.) We are all very much in that business.

    The fibration theorem (that R(X_*) \to \rho(X_*) is a Kan fibration) does link the weak structure on R to the strict structure on \rho, and really uses the filtration structure. It is one reason for working with filtered spaces, namely that the theory works.

    The situation with cat^n-groups IS more subtle, and needs further study. Note that although crossed squares and 2-crossed modules are related, we have an SvKT for the former but not for the latter, partly because there is a known homotopically defined functor \Pi: (topological data) \to (crossed squares), but not to 2-crossed modules. This sort of thing is partly why I am against the indiscriminate use of the term "fundamental" for functors which are seemingly not so fundamental, ot at any rate whose construction has no real meat!
    • CommentRowNumber54.
    • CommentAuthorMike Shulman
    • CommentTimeJul 15th 2012

    FWIW, I agree that the current statement on the nLab page is misleading; it doesn’t seem to be clear whether one can derive your strict van Kampen theorem from the weak \infty-groupoidal van Kampen theorem cited above it. It would be nice if someone could write out a comparison in dimension 1 along the lines of Marc’s suggestion (which seems at least likely to not be too difficult); making any comparison precise in dimension nn sounds like a much more significant undertaking.

    • CommentRowNumber55.
    • CommentAuthorTim_Porter
    • CommentTimeJul 15th 2012
    • (edited Jul 15th 2012)

    I have pencilled that in ‘to be looked at’ later this summer (if summer it is… rain, wind, clouds… , but a good ’feu d’artifice’ for the 14 juillet in Paris, with no rain!).

    • CommentRowNumber56.
    • CommentAuthorronniegpd
    • CommentTimeJul 15th 2012
    I have opened the matter for discussion with a question on mathoverflow 102295.
    • CommentRowNumber57.
    • CommentAuthorMike Shulman
    • CommentTimeJul 17th 2012
    • (edited Jul 17th 2012)

    I posted an answer to the MO question.

    It seems to me that from the nPOV, the SvKT “factors” into three parts:

    1. open covers of topological spaces induce homotopy colimits of fundamental \infty-groupoids
    2. colimits of nn-groupoids can often be computed using (n+2)(n+2)-truncations of diagrams, and
    3. sometimes colimits of nn-groupoids can be computed using strict colimits of strict presentations.

    Lurie’s general theorem is (1), while (2) is basically abstract nonsense. But for concrete computations, of course (3) is crucial! And (3) is also the most difficult to generalize to n>1n\gt 1. I suspect that from the nPOV, one could say that the value of cubical things / crossed complexes / etc. is that they are a sort of strict presentation where (3) holds usefully. (Which is not to denigrate other points of view on other values of such things… or to say that there may not exist other useful strict presentations… and could be entirely wrong because I still haven’t really understood the cubical approaches myself (sorry Ronnie).)

    So which part deserves to be called “the higher homotopy SvKT”? I dunno… for me, it’s certainly (1)+(2) that carry the “intuitive” meaning of the SvKT as I learned it. I kind of like Tim’s suggestion of “homotopy SvKT” and “strict SvKT”.

    • CommentRowNumber58.
    • CommentAuthorUrs
    • CommentTimeJul 17th 2012

    Lurie’s general theorem is (1), while (2) is basically abstract nonsense.

    In Lurie’s theorem the colimit is strict. If it is not clear from the statement of the theorem, search the proof for where it says “projectively cofibrant”.

    • CommentRowNumber59.
    • CommentAuthorDavidRoberts
    • CommentTimeJul 17th 2012

    Then he should state so in the theorem, namely “Sing(X) is the homotopy colimit, and even the strict colimit, of the diagram…”. :-)

    • CommentRowNumber60.
    • CommentAuthorMike Shulman
    • CommentTimeJul 17th 2012

    In Lurie’s theorem the colimit is strict.

    The colimit in his proof of Prop. A.3.2 is a strict homotopy colimit. But the colimit in the proof of Theorem A.3.1 is not (at least, not as far as I can see).

    However, you make me realize that my part (3) should also emphasize the use of an algebraic strict model, in order to really capture the computational value of an SvKT.

    • CommentRowNumber61.
    • CommentAuthorUrs
    • CommentTimeJul 17th 2012

    The colimit in his proof of Prop. A.3.2 is a strict homotopy colimit.

    And that’s the one we need for the traditional theorem: the one that takes the colimit over a cover.

    you make me realize that my part (3) should also emphasize the use of an algebraic strict model, in order to really capture the computational value of an SvKT.

    One can postcompose with the Quillen left adjoint that forms algebraic Kan complexes.

    You will maybe say that this is no the kind of “algebraic” that you actually mean. I’d think for the wish-list to be useful in item (3), one should provide some precise idea of what “computational value” is and why your preferred model has more of it than somebody else’s preferred model. But usually the most computational value is in having as many diferent models as possible.

    • CommentRowNumber62.
    • CommentAuthorMike Shulman
    • CommentTimeJul 17th 2012

    And that’s the one we need for the traditional theorem: the one that takes the colimit over a cover.

    It depends on what “traditional theorem” you are looking at. In my MO answer, I didn’t see a way to get Ronnie’s version with a specified set of basepoints out without using an auxiliary category CC like in A.3.1. But maybe you do?

    one should provide some precise idea of what “computational value” is and why your preferred model has more of it than somebody else’s preferred model.

    Thankfully, in this case we can be very precise about this. The traditional SvKT allows us to compute the (0-)group π 1\pi_1 of a space using 1-categorical colimits in the 1-category GrpGrp. I don’t see that in algebraic Kan complexes.

    • CommentRowNumber63.
    • CommentAuthorUrs
    • CommentTimeJul 21st 2012

    Ronnie’s version with a specified set of basepoints

    I haven’t thought about that version. I’d tend to regard a choice of basepoints as something one should avoid, unless we are in a context where it is part of the data, such as stable homotopy theory.

    The traditional SvKT allows us to compute the (0-)group π 1 of a space using 1-categorical colimits in the 1-category Grp.

    Or equivalently in GrpdGrpd.

    I don’t see that in algebraic Kan complexes.

    One generalizes a 1-pushout of groupoids to a 1-pushout of \infty-groupoids, and these can be chose to be algebraic, if desired.

    But let’s wrap this up: I am glad that we finally got to the point where we have all opened Lurie’s proof and seen what it actually says, notably that (and where) it involves 1-categorical limits.

    Now we can get back to the very beginning of the discussion and see how to improve the entry higher homotopy van Kampen theorem. Do you (some of you) still think that it “distorts” the situation?

    I don’t think it distorts the situation, but – as with essentially all nnLab entries – I see big potential for it to be expanded. Maybe somebody feels like doing so.

    • CommentRowNumber64.
    • CommentAuthorTim_Porter
    • CommentTimeJul 21st 2012

    The entry does not yet ’do justice’ to the variety of generalisations of the classical SvKT available, and perhaps should possibly indicate where there is work to do to clarify the relationships between them. I do think that we should use ’small simplex theorem’ as an equivalent term for Lurie’s version a bit more.

    I mean to have a go at reworking the entry and adding new entries on the Brown-Loday result, but this needs time that I cannot put in just at the moment. Perhaps ’ideally’ this should all be linked into the local-global / descent framework. I really should include some of this in the Menagerie as well! (so I do feel like doing it and hopefully in the not too distance future… .)

    • CommentRowNumber65.
    • CommentAuthorMike Shulman
    • CommentTimeJul 23rd 2012

    I started reworking the page, but realized that most of what I had to say was more about the ordinary van Kampen theorem, so I did a bunch of editing there. What do people think about that page now? If we agree that it’s better (or at least not worse), then I or someone else can edit higher homotopy van Kampen theorem along the same lines (although using Tim’s suggested terminology, perhaps that page should just be called “higher van Kampen theorem” since it is about both homotopy and strict versions).

    • CommentRowNumber66.
    • CommentAuthorTim_Porter
    • CommentTimeJul 23rd 2012

    Mike: put it in the plural: "higher van Kampen theorems" ?

    • CommentRowNumber67.
    • CommentAuthorMike Shulman
    • CommentTimeJul 24th 2012

    I suppose. Generally we don’t use plural page names, of course, but I guess the situation here is kind of different.

    • CommentRowNumber68.
    • CommentAuthorTim_Porter
    • CommentTimeJul 28th 2012

    I have had a go at improving the higher SvKT entry. Please have a look and give me feedback.

    • CommentRowNumber69.
    • CommentAuthorMike Shulman
    • CommentTimeJul 29th 2012

    O my, I thought we were talking about the page higher homotopy van Kampen theorem. I didn’t realize there was also higher van Kampen theorem! We should probably merge them…

    • CommentRowNumber70.
    • CommentAuthorTim_Porter
    • CommentTimeJul 29th 2012
    • (edited Jul 29th 2012)

    The higher homotopy …. page looks like an earlier version of the higher vKT page so perhaps merger is not necessary just redirecting, renaming or something. I cannot check on how much they are the same as I am just on a laptop and have no printer available (I know there are ’modern’ ways of comparing but the old fashioned way works well!)

    On content, I seem to remember some other types of vKT in the literature but have not looked for them yet.

    • CommentRowNumber71.
    • CommentAuthorMike Shulman
    • CommentTimeJul 29th 2012

    I know there are ’modern’ ways of comparing but the old fashioned way works well!

    But didn’t you just say that the old fashioned way isn’t working for you at the moment? (-:

    The page higher homotopy van Kampen theorem does indeed look almost like an exact duplicate of version 9 of the other page. I wonder how that happened? We should delete “higher homotopy van Kampen theorem” and redirect it. But I have no time to do so at the moment…

    • CommentRowNumber72.
    • CommentAuthorTim_Porter
    • CommentTimeJul 30th 2012
    • (edited Jul 30th 2012)

    It had already been done (about three times!). The redirects at the bottom of the source were repetitious, so I did some tidying. The other higher homotopy vKT page is still showing up… cache bug?

    • CommentRowNumber73.
    • CommentAuthorTim_Porter
    • CommentTimeJul 31st 2012

    I forgot to ask. Does anyone else know of places where there is some form of higher vKT?