In mathematics, homotopy theory is a systematic study of situations in which maps can come with homotopies between them. It originated as a topic in algebraic topology but nowadays is studied as an independent discipline. Besides algebraic topology, the theory has also been used in other areas of mathematics such as algebraic geometry (e.g., A1 homotopy theory) and (specifically the study of ). In homotopy theory and algebraic topology, the word "space" denotes a topological space.
In mathematics, a topological vector space (also called a linear topological space and commonly abbreviated TVS or t.v.s.) is one of the basic structures investigated in functional analysis. A topological vector space is a vector space that is also a topological space with the property that the vector space operations (vector addition and scalar multiplication) are also continuous functions. Such a topology is called a and every topological vector space has a uniform topological structure, allowing a notion of uniform convergence and completeness.
In mathematics, a topological space is, roughly speaking, a geometrical space in which closeness is defined but cannot necessarily be measured by a numeric distance. More specifically, a topological space is a set whose elements are called points, along with an additional structure called a topology, which can be defined as a set of neighbourhoods for each point that satisfy some axioms formalizing the concept of closeness.
In functional analysis and related areas of mathematics, a complete topological vector space is a topological vector space (TVS) with the property that whenever points get progressively closer to each other, then there exists some point towards which they all get closer. The notion of "points that get progressively closer" is made rigorous by or , which are generalizations of , while "point towards which they all get closer" means that this Cauchy net or filter converges to The notion of completeness for TVSs uses the theory of uniform spaces as a framework to generalize the notion of completeness for metric spaces.
In mathematics, the homotopy category is a built from the category of topological spaces which in a sense identifies two spaces that have the same shape. The phrase is in fact used for two different (but related) categories, as discussed below. More generally, instead of starting with the category of topological spaces, one may start with any and define its associated homotopy category, with a construction introduced by Quillen in 1967. In this way, homotopy theory can be applied to many other categories in geometry and algebra.
