We study functors from spaces to spaces or spectra that preserve weak homotopy equivalences. For each such functor we construct a universal n-excisive approximation, which may be thought of as its n-excisive part. Homogeneous functors, meaning n-excisive functors with trivial (n-1)-excisive part, can be classified: they correspond to symmetric functors of n variables that are reduced and 1-excisive in each variable. We discuss some important examples, including the identity functor and Waldhausen's algebraic K-theory.
We construct a calculus of functors in the spirit of orthogonal calculus, which is designed to study "functors with reality" such as the Real classifying space functor, $BU_\mathbb{R}(-)$. The calculus produces a Taylor tower, the $n$-th layer of which is classified by a spectrum with an action of $C_2 \ltimes U(n)$. We further give model categorical considerations, producing a zig-zag of Quillen equivalences between spectra with an action of $C_2 \ltimes U(n)$ and a model structure on the category of input functors which captures the homotopy theory of the $n$-th layer of the Taylor tower.
Manifold calculus is a form of functor calculus concerned with functors from some category of manifolds to spaces. A weakness in the original formulation is that it is not continuous in the sense that it does not handle well the natural enrichments. In this paper, we correct this by defining an enriched version of manifold calculus which essentially extends the discrete setting. Along the way, we recast the Taylor tower as a tower of homotopy sheafifications. As a spin-off we obtain a natural connection to operads: the limit of the Taylor tower is a certain (derived) space of right module maps…
Goodwillie's homotopy functor calculus constructs a Taylor tower of approximations to F, often a functor from spaces to spaces. Weiss's orthogonal calculus provides a Taylor tower for functors from vector spaces to spaces. In particular, there is a Weiss tower associated to the functor which sends a vector space V to F evaluated at the one-point compactification of V. In this paper, we give a comparison of these two towers and show that when F is analytic the towers agree up to weak equivalence. We include two main applications, one of which gives as a corollary the convergence of the Weiss Ta…
This is a (slightly edited) version of the PhD dissertation of the author, submitted to Brown University in July 2005. We construct a homotopy calculus of functors in the sense of Goodwillie for the categories of rational homotopy theory. More precisely, given a homotopy functor between any of the categories of differential graded vector spaces (DG), reduced differential graded vector spaces, differential graded Lie algebras (DGL), and differential graded coalgebras (DGC), we show that there is an associated approximating "rational Taylor tower" of excisive functors. The fibers in this tower a…
We associate a Taylor tower supplied by calculus of the embedding functor to the space of long knots and study its cohomology spectral sequence. The combinatorics of the spectral sequence along the line of total degree zero leads to chord diagrams with relations as in finite type knot theory. We show that the spectral sequence collapses along this line and that the Taylor tower represents a universal finite type knot invariant.
We study the beginning of the Taylor tower, supplied by manifold calculus of functors, for the space of r-immersions, which are immersions without r-fold self-intersections. We describe the first r layers of the tower and discuss the connectivities of the associated maps. We also prove several results about r-immersions that are of independent interest.
Manifold calculus of functors, due to M. Weiss, studies contravariant functors from the poset of open subsets of a smooth manifold to topological spaces. We introduce "multivariable" manifold calculus of functors which is a generalization of this theory to functors whose domain is a product of categories of open sets. We construct multivariable Taylor approximations to such functors, classify multivariable homogeneous functors, apply this classification to compute the derivatives of a functor, and show what this gives for the space of link maps. We also relate Taylor approximations in single v…
We present an introduction to the manifold calculus of functors, due to Goodwillie and Weiss. Our perspective focuses on the role the derivatives of a functor F play in this theory, and the analogies with ordinary calculus. We survey the construction of polynomial functors, the classification of homogeneous functors, and results regarding convergence of the Taylor tower. We sprinkle examples throughout, and pay special attention to spaces of smooth embeddings.
The orthogonal and unitary calculi give a method to study functors from the category of real or complex inner product spaces to the category of based topological spaces. We construct functors between the calculi from the complexification-realification adjunction between real and complex inner product spaces. These allow for movement between the versions of calculi, and comparisons between the Taylor towers produced by both calculi. We show that when the inputted orthogonal functor is weakly polynomial, the Taylor tower of the functor restricted through realification and the restricted Taylor t…
Recently, the Johnson-McCarthy discrete calculus for homotopy functors was extended to include functors from an unbased simplicial model category to spectra. This paper completes the constructions needed to ensure that there exists a discrete calculus tower for functors from an unbased simplicial model category to chain complexes over a fixed commutative ring. Much of the construction of the Taylor tower for functors to spectra carries over to this context. However, one of the essential steps in the construction requires proving that a particular functor is part of a cotriple. For this, one ne…
We construct the unitary analogue of orthogonal calculus developed by Weiss, utilising model categories to give a clear description of the intricacies in the equivariance and homotopy theory involved. The subtle differences between real and complex geometry lead to subtle differences between orthogonal and unitary calculus. To address these differences we construct unitary spectra - a variation of orthogonal spectra - as a model for the stable homotopy category. We show through a zig-zag of Quillen equivalences that unitary spectra with an action of the $n$-th unitary group models the homogene…
We describe Taylor towers for spaces of knots arising from Goodwillie-Weiss calculus of the embedding functor and extend the configuration space integrals of Bott and Taubes from spaces of knots to the stages of the towers. We show that certain combinations of integrals, indexed by trivalent diagrams, yield cohomology classes of the stages of the tower, just as they do for ordinary knots.
The Taylor tower of a functor from based spaces to spectra can be classified according to the action of a certain comonad on the collection of derivatives of the functor. We describe various equivalent conditions under which this action can be lifted to the structure of a module over the Koszul dual of the little L-discs operad. In particular, we show that this is the case when the functor is a left Kan extension from a certain category of `pointed framed L-manifolds' and pointed framed embeddings. As an application we prove that the Taylor tower of Waldhausen's algebraic K-theory of spaces fu…
Manifold calculus of functors has in recent years been successfully used in the study of the topology of various spaces of embeddings of one manifold in another. Given a space of embeddings, the theory produces a Taylor tower whose purpose is to approximate this space in a suitable sense. Central to the story are deep theorems about the convergence of this tower. We provide an exposition of the convergence results in the special case of embeddings into $\mathbb R^n$, which has been the case of primary interest in applications. We try to use as little machinery as possible and give several impr…
For a functor with smash product F and an F-bimodule P, we construct an invariant W(F;P) which is an analog of TR(F) with coefficients. We study the structure of this invariant and its finite-stage approximations W_n(F;P), and conclude that for F the FSP associated to a ring R and P the FSP associated to the simplicial R-bimodule M[X] (with M a simplicial R-bimodule, X a simplicial set), the functor sending X to W_n(R;M[X]) is the nth stage of the Goodwillie calculus Taylor tower of the functor which sends X to the reduced K-theory spectrum of R with coefficients in M[X]. Thus the functor send…
Goodwillie's calculus of homotopy functors associates a tower of polynomial approximations, the Taylor tower, to a functor of topological spaces over a fixed space. We define a new tower, the varying center tower, for functors of categories with a fixed initial object, such as algebras under a fixed ring spectrum. We construct this new tower using elements of the Taylor tower constructions of Bauer, Johnson, and McCarthy for functors of simplicial model categories, and show how the varying center tower differs from Taylor towers in terms of the properties of its individual terms and convergenc…
We call attention to the intermediate constructions $\T_n F$ in Goodwillie's Calculus of homotopy functors, giving a new model which naturally gives rise to a family of towers filtering the Taylor Tower of a functor. We also establish a surprising equivalence between the homotopy inverse limits of these towers and the homotopy inverse limits of certain cosimplicial resolutions. This equivalence gives a greatly simplified construction for the homotopy inverse limit of the Taylor tower of a functor $F$ under general assumptions.
Given a compact manifold X, the set of simple manifold structures on X x Δ^k relative to the boundary can be viewed as the k-th homotopy group of a space §^s (X). This space is called the block structure space of X. We study the block structure spaces of real projective spaces. Generalizing Wall's join construction we show that there is a functor from the category of finite dimensional real vector spaces with inner product to the category of pointed spaces which sends the vector space V to the block structure space of the projective space of V. We study this functor from the point of view of o…
We show Goodwillie's calculus of functors and $n$-geometric $D^{-}$-stacks share similar features by starting to focus on the convergence of Taylor towers for homotopy functors and the fact that $\mathbb{R} F(A) \cong \text{holim} \mathbb{R} F(A_{\leq n})$ for geometric stacks, where $\{ A_{\leq n} \}$ provides a Postnikov tower of some given $A \in s \text{k-Alg}$. From there we show parallel results, such as similar homotopy fibers of connecting maps in towers, as well as polynomial approximations, pointwise approximations and reconstruction theorems for towers.
Let M be a smooth manifold and V a Euclidean space. Let Ebar(M,V) be the homotopy fiber of the map from Emb(M,V) to Imm(M,V). This paper is about the rational homology of Ebar(M,V). We study it by applying embedding calculus and orthogonal calculus to the bi-functor (M,V) |--> HQ /\Ebar(M,V)_+. Our main theorem states that if the dimension of V is more than twice the embedding dimension of M, the Taylor tower in the sense of orthogonal calculus (henceforward called ``the orthogonal tower'') of this functor splits as a product of its layers. Equivalently, the rational homology spectral sequence…
This work continues the study of a homotopy-theoretic construction of the author inspired by the Bott-Taubes integrals. Bott and Taubes constructed knot invariants by integrating differential forms along the fiber of a bundle over the space of knots. Their techniques were later used by Cattaneo et al. to construct real "Vassiliev-type" cohomology classes in spaces of knots in higher-dimensional Euclidean space. By doing this integration via a Pontrjagin-Thom construction, we constructed cohomology classes in the knot space with arbitrary coefficients. We later showed that a refinement of this …
We give a shorter proof of Lemma 1.9 from Goodwillie, "Calculus III", which is the key step in proving that the construction P_nF gives an n-excisive functor.
We study functors F from C_f to D where C and D are simplicial model categories and C_f is the full subcategory of C consisting of objects that factor a fixed morphism f from A to B. We define the analogs of Eilenberg and Mac Lane's cross effects functors in this context, and identify explicit adjoint pairs of functors whose associated cotriples are the diagonals of the cross effects. With this, we generalize the cotriple Taylor tower construction of [10] from the setting of functors from pointed categories to abelian categories to that of functors from C_f to D to produce a tower of functors …
In this paper, we consider abelian functor calculus, the calculus of functors of abelian categories established by the second author and McCarthy. We carefully construct a category of abelian categories and suitably homotopically defined functors, and show that this category, equipped with the directional derivative, is a cartesian differential category in the sense of Blute, Cockett, and Seely. This provides an abstract framework that makes certain analogies between classical and functor calculus explicit. Inspired by Huang, Marcantognini, and Young's chain rule for higher order directional d…
We study high-dimensional analogues of spaces of long knots. These are spaces of compactly-supported embeddings (modulo immersions) of $\mathbb{R}^m$ into $\mathbb{R}^n$. We view the space of embeddings as the value of a certain functor at $\mathbb{R}^m$, and we apply manifold calculus to this functor. Our first result says that the Taylor tower of this functor can be expressed as the space of maps between infinitesimal bimodules over the little disks operad. We then show that the formality of the little disks operad has implications for the homological behavior of the Taylor tower. Our second…
In this paper we obtain results indicating that fine shape is tractable and "not too strong" even in the non-locally compact case, and can be used to better understand infinite-dimensional metrizable spaces and their homology theories. We show that every Polish space $X$ is fine shape equivalent to the limit of an inverse sequence of simplicial maps between metric simplicial complexes. A deeper result is that if $X$ is locally finite dimensional, then the simplicial maps can be chosen to be non-degenerate. They cannot be chosen to be non-degenerate if $X$ is the Taylor compactum.
For a finite dimensional real vector space V with inner product, let F(V) be the block structure space, in the sense of surgery theory, of the projective space of V. Continuing a program launched in part I, we investigate F as a functor on vector spaces with inner product, relying on functor calculus ideas. It was shown in part I that F agrees with its first Taylor approximation T_1 F (which is a polynomial functor of degree 1) on vector spaces V with dim(V) > 5. To convert this theorem into a functorial homotopy-theoretic description of F(V), one needs to know in addition what T_1 F(V) is whe…
