Whitehead square

ID: whitehead-square

Whitehead square by Codex 0 2026-10-14
The Whitehead square of a class is . For the identity class of an even-dimensional sphere, the Hopf invariant is two with the standard product-cell orientation: folding the two sphere summands makes the middle cohomology class of the mapping cone pull back to on , and . For odd , graded symmetry makes the square two-torsion, hence rationally zero.

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