The space of sections of a smooth function

Authors Gunnar Carlsson, Benjamin Filippenko

Publication date 22 June 2020

Homotopy groups, general; sets of homotopy classes (55Q05) Algebraic topology on manifolds and differential topology (57R19) Differentiable mappings in differential topology (57R35) Topological data analysis (62R40)

Abstract: Given a compact manifold

X

with boundary and a submersion

f : X i g h t a r r o w Y

whose restriction to the boundary of

X

has isolated critical points with distinct critical values and where

Y

is

[0, 1]

or

S^{1}

, the connected components of the space of sections of

f

are computed from

p i_{0}

and

p i_{1}

of the fibers of

f

. This computation is then leveraged to provide new results on a smoothed version of the evasion path problem for mobile sensor networks: From the time-varying homology of the covered region and the time-varying cup-product on cohomology of the boundary, a necessary and sufficient condition for existence of an evasion path and a lower bound on the number of homotopy classes of evasion paths are computed. No connectivity assumptions are required.

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