A Model of Directed Graph Cofiber

In the homotopy theory of spaces, the image of a continuous map is contractible to a point in its cofiber. This property does not apply when we discretize spaces and continuous maps to directed graphs and their morphisms. In this paper, we give a construction of a cofiber of a directed graph map whose image is contractible in the cofiber. Our work reveals that a category-theoretically correct construction in continuous setup is no longer correct when it is discretized and hence leads to look at canonical constructions in category theory in a different perspective.

Inertia groups and smooth structures on quaternionic projective spaces

This paper deals with certain results on the number of smooth structures on quaternionic projective spaces, obtained through the computation of inertia groups and their analogues, which in turn are computed using techniques from stable homotopy theory. We show that the concordance inertia group is trivial in dimension 20, but there are many examples in high dimensions where the concordance inertia group is non-trivial. We extend these to computations of concordance classes of smooth structures. These have applications to 3-sphere actions on homotopy spheres and tangential homotopy structures.

Homotopy theory of Moore flows (II)

This paper proves that the q-model structures of Moore flows and of multipointed d-spaces are Quillen equivalent. The main step is the proof that the counit and unit maps of the Quillen adjunction are isomorphisms on the q-cofibrant objects (all objects are q-fibrant). As an application, we provide a new proof of the fact that the categorization functor from multipointed d-spaces to flows has a total left derived functor which induces a category equivalence between the homotopy categories. The new proof sheds light on the internal structure of the categorization functor which is neither a left adjoint nor a right adjoint. It is even possible to write an inverse up to homotopy of this functor using Moore flows.

Solving binary programming problems using homotopy theory ideas

PurposeThe aim of the study is to show that merging two areas of mathematics – topology and discrete optimization – could result in a viable option to solve classical or specialized integer problems.Design/methodology/approachIn the paper, discrete topology concepts are applied to propose a metaheuristic algorithm that is capable to solve binary programming problems. Particularly, some of the homotopy for paths principles are used to explore the solution space associated with four well-known NP-hard problems herein considered as follows: knapsack, set covering, bi-level single plant location with order and one-max.FindingsComputational experimentation confirms that the proposed algorithm performs in an effective manner, and it is able to efficiently solve the sets of instances used for the benchmark. Moreover, the performance of the proposed algorithm is compared with a standard genetic algorithm (GA), a scatter search (SS) method and a memetic algorithm (MA). Acceptable results are obtained for all four implemented metaheuristics, but the path homotopy algorithm stands out.Originality/valueA novel metaheuristic is proposed for the first time. It uses topology concepts to design an algorithmic framework to solve binary programming problems in an effective and efficient manner.

THE TOM DIECK SPLITTING THEOREM IN EQUIVARIANT MOTIVIC HOMOTOPY THEORY

We establish, in the setting of equivariant motivic homotopy theory for a finite group, a version of tom Dieck’s splitting theorem for the fixed points of a suspension spectrum. Along the way we establish structural results and constructions for equivariant motivic homotopy theory of independent interest. This includes geometric fixed-point functors and the motivic Adams isomorphism.