7 Homology Cross Product
7 Homology Cross Product
7 Homology Cross Product
hX σ = (−1)n σ × ι .
Let’s compute:
dhX σ = (−1)n d(σ × ι) = (−1)n (dσ) × ι + σ × (dι)
But dι = c01 − c00 ∈ S0 (I), which means that we can continue (remembering that |∂σ| = n − 1):
Lemma 7.1. These data determine a bilinear map × : Hp (A) × Hq (B) → Hp+q (C).
Proof. Let a ∈ Zp (A) and b ∈ Zq (B). We want to define [a] × [b] ∈ Hp+q (C). We hope that
[a] × [b] = [a × b]. We need to check that a × b is a cycle. By Leibniz, d(a × b) = da × b + (−1)p a × db,
which vanishes becauxe a, b are cycles.
Now we need to check that homology class depends only on the homology classes we started
with. So pick other cycles a0 and b0 in the same homology classes. We want [a × b] = [a0 × b0 ]. In
16 CHAPTER 1. SINGULAR HOMOLOGY
other words, we need to show that a × b differs from a0 × b0 by a boundary. We can write a0 = a + da
and b0 = b + db, and compute, using bilinearity:
a0 × b0 = (a + da) + (b + db) = a × b + a × db + (da) × b + (da) × (db)
We need to deal with the last three terms here. But since da = 0,
d(a × b) = (−1)p a × (db) .
Since db = 0,
d((a) × b) = (da) × b .
And since d2 b = 0,
d(a × b) = (da) × (db) .
This means that a0 × b0 and a × b differ by
d (−1)p (a × b) + a × b + a × db ,
3 2 3 2 3
1 2 1
0 0 0
8. RELATIVE HOMOLOGY 17
This chain is due to Eilenberg and Mac Lane; the description appears in a paper [4] by Eilenberg
and Moore. It’s very pretty, but it’s combinatorially annoying to check that this satisfies the
conditions of the theorem. It provides an explicit chain map
βX,Y : S∗ (X) × S∗ (Y ) → S∗ (X × Y )
that satisfies many good properties on the nose and not just up to chain homotopy. For example,
it’s associative –
βX,Y ×1
S∗ (X) × S∗ (Y ) × S∗ (Z) / S∗ (X × Y ) × S∗ (Z)
1×βY,Z βX×Y,Z
βX,Y ×Z
S∗ (X) × S∗ (Y × Z) / S∗ (X × Y × Z)
T S∗ (T )
βY,X
S∗ (Y ) × S∗ (X) / S∗ (X × Y )
commutes, where on spaces T (x, y) = (y, x), and on chain complexes T (a, b) = (−1)pq (b, a) when a
has degree p and b has degree q.
We will see that these properties hold up to chain homotopy for any choice of chain-level cross
product.
8 Relative homology
An ultimate goal of algebraic topology is to find means to compute the set of homotopy classes
of maps from one space to another. This is important because many geometrical problems can be
rephrased as such a computation. It’s a lot more modest than wanting to characterize, somehow,
all continuous maps from X to Y ; but the very fact that it still contains a great deal of interesting
information means that it is still a very challenging problem.
Homology is in a certain sense the best “additive” approximation to this problem; and its ad-
ditivity makes it much more computable. To justify this, we want to describe the sense in which
homology is “additive.” Here are two related aspects of this claim.
Bibliography
[1] M. G. Barratt and J. Milnor, An example of anomalous singular homology, Proc. Amer. Math.
Soc. 13 (1962) 293–297.
[4] S. Eilenberg and J. C. Moore, Homology and fibrations, I: Coalgebras, cotensor product and its
derived functors, Comment. Math. Helv. 40 (1965) 199–236.
[5] S. Eilenberg and N. Steenrod, Foundations of Algebraic Topology, Princeton University Press,
1952.
[7] D. Kan, Adjoint funtors, Trans. Amer. Math. Soc. 87 (1958) 294–329.
[9] J. C. Moore, On the homotopy groups of spaces with a single non-vanishing homology group,
Ann. Math. 59 (1954) 549–557.
[10] C. T. C Wall, Finiteness conditions for CW complexes, Ann. Math. 81 (1965) 56–69.
109
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