arXiv subjects
Publications and source records attributed to Thomas G. Goodwillie.
The existence of nontrivial cup products or Massey products in the cohomology of a manifold leads to inequalities of systolic type, but in general such inequalities are not optimal (tight). Gromov proved an {optimal} systolic inequality for complex projective space. We provide a natural extension of Gromov's inequality to manifolds whose fundamental cohomology class is a cup product of 2-dimensional classes.
We introduce a Grothendieck group $E_n$ for bounded polytopes in $\mathbb R^n$. It differs from the usual Euclidean scissors congruence group in that lower-dimensional polytopes are not ignored. We also define an analogous group $L_n$ using germs of polytopes at a point, which is related to spherical scissors congruence. This provides a setting for a generalization of the Dehn invariant.
We obtain multirelative connectivity statements about spaces of smooth embeddings, deducing these from analogous results about spaces of Poincare embeddings that were established in our previous paper.
We study the space of link maps, which are smooth maps from the disjoint union of manifolds P and Q to a manifold N such that the images of P and Q are disjoint. We give a range of dimensions, interpreted as the connectivity of a certain map, in which the cobordism class of the "linking manifold" is enough to distinguish the homotopy class of one link map from another.
We obtain multirelative connectivity statements about spaces of Poincare embeddings, as precursors to analogous statements about spaces of smooth embeddings. The latter are the key to convergence results in the functor calculus approach to spaces of embeddings.
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.
Let M and N be smooth manifolds. For an open V of M let emb(V,N) be the space of embeddings from V to N. By results of Goodwillie and Goodwillie-Klein, the cofunctor V |--> emb(V,N) is analytic if dim(N)-dim(M) > 2. We deduce that its Taylor series converges to it. For details about the Taylor series, see Part I.