Vietoris thickenings and complexes have isomorphic homotopy groups (Q6175711)

The main result of this paper states that, given a uniformly bounded open cover \(\mathcal U\) of a separable metric space \(X\), the homotopy groups of the Vietoris thickening \(\mathcal V^m(\mathcal U)\) are isomorphic to those of the Vietoris complex \(\mathcal V(\mathcal U)\). Choosing appropriate open covers, the authors obtain isomorphisms between the homotopy groups of the Vietoris-Rips and Čech complexes of \(X\) and their respective metric thickenings. The clarity of the paper is refreshing. Its introduction provides motivation and context and the section on preliminaries contains a clear exposition of the main objects of study. Different versions of the nerve theorem feature as essential tools for the proof of the main result which also relies on the fact that \(\mathcal V^m(\mathcal U)\) is contractible. The latter is proved towards the end of the paper which concludes with a discussion of open questions.