Date of Award

Spring 2023

Document Type

Thesis

Degree Name

Master of Arts (MA)

Department

Mathematics

Committee Chairperson

Jeremy Brazas, Ph.D.

Committee Member

Shiv Gupta, Ph.D.

Committee Member

Michael Fisher, Ph.D.

Abstract

When non-trivial local structures are present in a topological space X, a common ap- proach to characterizing the isomorphism type of the n-th homotopy group πn(X, x0) is to consider the image of πn(X, x0) in the n-th ˇCech homotopy group ˇπn(X, x0) under the canonical homomorphism Ψn : πn(X, x0) → ˇπn(X, x0). The subgroup ker Ψn is the obstruc- tion to this tactic as it consists of precisely those elements of πn(X, x0), which cannont be detected by polyhedral approximations to X. In this paper we present a definition of higher dimensional analouges of Thick Spanier groups use higher dimensional Spanier groups to characterize ker Ψn. In particular, we prove that if X is paracompact, Hausdroff, and UVn−1, then ker Ψn is equal to the n-th Spanier group of X. We also use the perspec- tive of higher Spanier groups to generalize a theorem of Kozlowski-Segal, which gives conditions to ensure that Ψn is an isomorphism

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