Cubical Homotopy Theory

Graduate students and researchers alike will benefit from this treatment of classical and modern topics in homotopy theory of topological spaces with an emphasis on cubical diagrams. The book contains 300 examples and provides detailed explanations of many fundamental results. Part I focuses on foundational material on homotopy theory, viewed through the lens of cubical diagrams: fibrations and cofibrations, homotopy pullbacks and pushouts, and the Blakers–Massey Theorem. Part II includes a brief example-driven introduction to categories, limits and colimits, an accessible account of homotopy limits and colimits of diagrams of spaces, and a treatment of cosimplicial spaces. The book finishes with applications to some exciting new topics that use cubical diagrams: an overview of two versions of calculus of functors and an account of recent developments in the study of the topology of spaces of knots.

Brian A. Munson is an Assistant Professor of Mathematics at the US Naval Academy. He has held postdoctoral and visiting positions at Stanford University, Harvard University, and Wellesley College, Massachusetts. His research area is algebraic topology, and his work spans topics such as embedding theory, knot theory, and homotopy theory.

Ismar Volić is an Associate Professor of Mathematics at Wellesley College, Massachusetts. He has held postdoctoral and visiting positions at the University of Virginia, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and Louvain-la-Neuve University in Belgium. His research is in algebraic topology and his articles span a wide variety of subjects such as knot theory, homotopy theory, and category theory. He is an award-winning teacher whose research has been recognized by several grants from the National Science Foundation.