In the last year of his life, Bob Thomason reworked the notion of a model category, used to adapt homotopy theory to algebra, and used homotopy ends to affirmatively solve a problem raised by Grothendieck: find a notion of model structure which is inherited by functor categories. In this paper we explain and prove Thomason's results, based on his private notebooks.
The first half presents Thomason's ideas about homotopy ends and its generalizations. This material may be of independent interest. Then we define Thomason model categories and give some examples. The usual proof shows that the homotopy category exists.
In the last two sections we prove the main theorem: functor categories inherit a Thomason model structure, at least when the original category is enriched over simplicial sets and fibrations are preserved by limits.
We use a classical result of McCord and reduction methods of finite spaces to prove a generalization of Thomason's theorem on homotopy colimits over posets. In particular this allows us to characterize the homotopy colimits of diagrams of simplicial complexes in terms of the Grothendieck construction on the diagrams of their face posets. We also derive analogues of well known results on homotopy colimits in the combinatorial setting, including a cofinality theorem and a generalization of Quillen's Theorem A for posets.
In his paper "Théories homotopiques des 2-catégories", Jonathan Chiche studies homotopy theories on 2-Cat, the category of small strict 2-categories, given by classes of weak equivalences which he calls basic localizers of 2-Cat. These basic localizers of 2-Cat are a 2-categorical generalization of the notion of a basic localizer introduced by Grothendieck in "Pursuing stacks". In this paper, we deduce from the results of Jonathan Chiche and results we have obtained with Georges Maltsiniotis that for essentially every basic localizer W of 2-Cat, there exists a model category structure à la Tho…
We extend Thomason's homotopy colimit construction in the category of permutative categories to categories of algebras over an arbitrary $\Cat$ operad and analyze its properties. We then use this homotopy colimit to prove that the classifying space functor induces an equivalence between the category of $n$-fold monoidal categories and the category of $\mathcal{C}_n$-spaces after formally inverting certain classes of weak equivalences, where $\mathcal{C}_n$ is the little $n$-cubes operad. As a consequence we obtain an equivalence of the categories of $n$-fold monoidal categories and the categor…
This paper contains some contributions to the study of the relationship between 2-categories and the homotopy types of their classifying spaces. Mainly, generalizations are given of both Quillen's Theorem B and Thomason's Homotopy Colimit Theorem to 2-functors.
Like categories, small 2-categories have well-understood classifying spaces. In this paper, we deal with homotopy types represented by 2-diagrams of 2-categories. Our results extend to homotopy colimits of 2-functors lower categorical analogues that have been classically used in algebraic topology and algebraic K-theory, such as the Homotopy Invariance Theorem (by Bousfield and Kan), the Homotopy Colimit Theorem (Thomason), Theorems A and B (Quillen), or the Homotopy Cofinality Theorem (Hirschhorn).
The main objective of this paper is to show that the homotopy colimit of a diagram of quasi-categories and indexed by a small category is a localization of Lurie's higher Grothendieck construction of the diagram. We thereby generalize Thomason's classical result which states that the homotopy colimit of a diagram of categories has the homotopy type of (the classifying space of) the Grothendieck construction of the diagram of categories.
We construct a cofibrantly generated Quillen model structure on the category of small n-fold categories and prove that it is Quillen equivalent to the standard model structure on the category of simplicial sets. An n-fold functor is a weak equivalence if and only if the diagonal of its n-fold nerve is a weak equivalence of simplicial sets. This is an n-fold analogue to Thomason's Quillen model structure on Cat. We introduce an n-fold Grothendieck construction for multisimplicial sets, and prove that it is a homotopy inverse to the n-fold nerve. As a consequence, we completely prove that the un…
In this paper we describe two ways on which cofibred categories give rise to bisimplicial sets. The "fibred nerve" is a natural extension of Segal's classical nerve of a category, and it constitutes an alternative simplicial description of the homotopy type of the total category. If the fibration is splitting, then one can construct the "cleaved nerve", a smaller variant which emerges from a distinguished closed cleavage. We interpret some classical theorems by Thomason and Quillen in terms of our constructions, and use the fibred and cleaved nerve to establish new results on homotopy and homo…
This book is an account of certain topics in general and algebraic topology. Instead of laying out a synopsis of each chapter, here is a sample of some of what is taken up: 1) Nilpotency and its role in homotopy theory. 2) Bousfield's theory of the localization of spaces and spectra. 3) Homotopy limits and colimits and their applications. 4) The James construction, symmetric products, and the Dold$-$Thom theorem. 5) Brown and Adams representability in the setting of triangulated categories 6) Operads and the May$-$Thomason theorem on the uniqueness of infinite loop space machines. 7) The plus …
A simplicial set is said to be non-singular if its non-degenerate simplices are embedded. Let $sSet$ denote the category of simplicial sets. We prove that the full subcategory $nsSet$ whose objects are the non-singular simplicial sets admits a model structure such that $nsSet$ becomes is Quillen equivalent to $sSet$ equipped with the standard model structure due to Quillen. The model structure on $nsSet$ is right-induced from $sSet$ and it makes $nsSet$ a proper cofibrantly generated model category. Together with Thomason's model structure on small categories (1980) and Raptis' model structure…
Using an idea due to R.Thomason, we define a "homology theory" on the category of rings which satisfies excision, exactness, homotopy (in the algebraic sense) and periodicity of order 4. For regular noetherian rings, we find P. Balmer's higher Witt groups. For more general rings, this homology isomorphic to the KT-theory of J. Hornbostel, inspired by the work of B. Williams. For real or complex C*-algebras, we recover - up to 2 torsion - topological K-theory.
We provide an explicit formula for localizing $A^1$-homotopy invariants of topological Fukaya categories of marked surfaces. Following a proposal of Kontsevich, this differential $\mathbb Z$-graded category is defined as global sections of a constructible cosheaf of dg categories on any spine of the surface. Our theorem utilizes this sheaf-theoretic description to reduce the calculation of invariants to the local case when the surface is a boundary-marked disk. At the heart of the proof lies a theory of localization for topological Fukaya categories which is a combinatorial analog of Thomason-…
In this paper we develop homotopy theoretical methods for studying diagrams. In particular we explain how to construct homotopy colimits and limits in an arbitrary model category. The key concept we introduce is that of a model approximation. Our key result says that if a category admits a model approximation then so does any diagram category with values in this category. From the homotopy theoretical point of view categories with model approximations have similar properties to those of model categories. They admit homotopy categories (localizations with respect to weak equivalences). They als…
C. Weibel and Thomason-Trobaugh proved (under some assumptions) that algebraic K-theory with coefficients is A1-homotopy invariant. In this article we generalize this result from schemes to the broad setting of dg categories. Along the way, we extend Bass-Quillen's fundamental theorem as well as Stienstra's foundational work on module structures over the big Witt ring to the setting of dg categories. Among other cases, the above A1-homotopy invariance result can now be applied to sheaves of (not necessarily commutative) dg algebras over stacks. As an application, we compute the algebraic K-the…
This paper is part of a series of papers about homotopy theory of strict $n$-categories. In the first paper of this series, we gave conditions that guarantee the existence of a Thomason model category structure on the category of strict $n$-categories. The main goal of our paper is to show one of these conditions. To do so, we associate to any simplicial complex a strict $\infty$-category generated by a computad. We conjecture that this $\infty$-category has the same homotopy type as the corresponding simplicial complex and we prove this conjecture when the simplicial complex comes from a pose…
We study the triangulated subcategories of compact objects in stable homotopy categories such as the homotopy category of spectra, the derived categories of rings, and the stable module categories of Hopf algebras. In the first part of this thesis we use a K-theory recipe of Thomason to classify these subcategories. This recipe when applied to the category of finite p-local spectra gives a refinement of the ``chromatic tower''. This refinement has some interesting consequences. In particular, it gives new evidence to a conjecture of Frank Adams that the thick subcategory C_2 can be generated b…
We study actions of monoidal categories on objects in a suitably enriched $2$-category, and applications in stable homotopy theory. Given a monoidal category $\mathcal{I}$ and an $\mathcal{I}$-object $\mathcal{A}$, the (co)stabilization of $\mathcal{A}$ is obtained by universally forcing the $\mathcal{I}$-action to be reversible so that every object of $\mathcal{I}$ acts on $\mathcal{A}$ by auto-equivalences. We introduce a notion of $\mathcal{I}$-equivariance for morphisms between $\mathcal{I}$-objects and give constructions of stabilization and costabilization in terms of weak ends and coend…
