We use the James reduced product theorem and the Bott–Samelson theorem: if is a connected based CW complex with free integral homology, then is a weak equivalence, and its induced Pontryagin ring is
Here is the reduced suspension, is the tensor algebra, and the multiplication is induced by concatenating James words, hence by concatenating loops. Taking supplies a single generator of degree , so
is free, with one generator in every degree and zero in the other degrees.
The diagonal makes this a homology coalgebra. The generator is a primitive homology class:
There are no nontrivial lower positive degrees in which its reduced diagonal could land. Compatibility of the diagonal with loop multiplication gives
The degree of is even, so the two tensor factors commute without a Koszul sign rule.
The universal coefficient theorem for cohomology has no Ext terms here because homology is free. Let be the cohomology class dual to , with and . The cup product is dual to the diagonal, hence
Therefore the integral cohomology ring is the divided power algebra
Explicitly for , and all other cohomology groups vanish. In particular : over the integers this is not a polynomial ring on . This is the integral cohomology of an odd-sphere loop space.
For the requested homology multiplication, use the homology cross product followed by concatenation:
The constant loop gives the degree-zero unit. Loop concatenation is associative up to homotopy, which suffices for associativity on homology; Moore loops can make the space-level operation strictly associative. The Künneth theorem identifies the tensor-product homology because its groups are free abelian groups. The Bott–Samelson theorem identifies this product with word multiplication, so . The Pontryagin ring of an odd-sphere loop space has presentation
With only one generator the tensor algebra has the indicated polynomial presentation. The homology product and the divided-power cohomology product are different operations.
In a nontrivial free product, nonidentity elements from different factors satisfy , since these are distinct alternating normal forms. Such a group is not an abelian group, whereas the free abelian group is abelian.
The ordinary Poincare duality statement here is for a compact manifold without boundary, of dimension , oriented over the field . Its fundamental class induces isomorphisms
for every . For a manifold with boundary the appropriate statement is Poincare-Lefschetz duality with relative groups; the ordinary pairing need not be nondegenerate. Over a field, the universal coefficient theorem for cohomology identifies with the full dual of . The cap-cup evaluation identity and duality therefore make
a perfect pairing. Explicitly, a nonzero has a nonzero cap product, and a linear functional on its homology group takes a nonzero value on that product. The same argument in the other variable proves nonsingularity. On the whole graded cohomology, define by taking the degree- part of before evaluation. For a nonzero component choose homogeneous of degree to pair nontrivially with it. All other components contribute zero in degree . This proves that the Poincare duality pairing is a nondegenerate bilinear form on ; it need not be symmetric on all degrees.
Put , so is positive and odd, and orient each by its product orientation. The Künneth theorem gives integral cohomology in degrees zero and , in degree , and zero elsewhere. Its two degree- generators have , equal to its top orientation class, and .
For a connected sum of oriented manifolds, excision and the long exact sequence for deleting a ball show that deleting a ball removes the top homology class and leaves all lower positive homology groups unchanged. The boundary sphere represents zero in the punctured manifold: it is the boundary of its relative fundamental chain. In the Mayer–Vietoris sequence for the two punctured pieces joined along the separating sphere, the orientation class of the connected sum maps onto that sphere's class. The intermediate positive groups are consequently the direct sums of the groups of the two original manifolds. This also covers , where the sphere is a circle and the boundary-class observation is necessary in the middle degree. Iterating and applying the universal coefficient theorem for cohomology gives
Here ; under the conventional extension the same formula holds with a zero middle group.
Let be the top cohomological orientation class. The connected-sum pinch map to the wedge of the sphere products gives degree-one projections to each summand. Pull back the two factor classes from summand to obtain . Their product is , since the projection has degree one. Classes from different wedge summands have zero positive-degree cup products, and graded commutativity of the cup product supplies the reversed sign. Thus the full cohomology ring of a connected sum of odd-dimensional sphere products is the graded free abelian group just displayed with multiplication
The unit is , and times any positive-degree class is zero by dimension. This describes all products, including .
The smooth involution is a diffeomorphism, since it is its own inverse. Its fixed set is closed; discreteness and compactness therefore make it finite. The supplied positivity of makes every fixed point nondegenerate with local index . The Lefschetz-Hopf fixed-point theorem then gives
Indeed the degree-zero and top-degree traces are both one, because the manifold is connected and preserves its orientation; the middle degree is odd.
On , the form is a nondegenerate alternating bilinear form by Poincare duality and the oddness of . Thus it is a symplectic vector space of dimension . Naturality and orientation preservation show that preserves , and . For the eigenspaces of a symplectic involution, write : the polynomial has distinct roots over . If and , then , so the two vector subspaces are orthogonal. Each restricted form is nondegenerate, since a vector annihilating its own vector subspace also annihilates the other and hence all of . Their dimensions are therefore even, say , , with . Consequently
This proves the fixed-point congruence for an involution on an odd-sphere connected sum:
Each factor is a free abelian group of rank two. Take the infinite symmetric generating set
The Bass-Serre tree has an edge joining to for every . Indeed, the normal form theorem for a free product gives , so a nonempty coset intersection consists of exactly one element. Let be the midpoint of and send the Cayley vertex to .
Two distinct edges share an endpoint precisely when or . This is exactly adjacency in the Cayley graph for . A path in that graph therefore gives a path between the midpoints of the same length in the tree. Conversely, the unique tree segment between two edge midpoints passes through a succession of adjacent edges and gives a Cayley path of that length. Hence, on vertices,
All edge midpoints occur, and every tree point is within of one of them. Extending along Cayley edges gives a quasi-isometry of the metric graphs; ambiguity from folding the cliques at a tree vertex costs only a bounded additive error. This is the free product with factor generating set construction.
For finite generating sets the answer changes. Use . The retraction killing sends every generator to a generator of or to the identity. Therefore the restriction of to is exactly the standard word metric on .
In this grid, take vertices . Use the two axis segments as two sides, and the path from through to as the third. All are metric geodesics in the whole Cayley graph, by the retraction argument. The corner is at distance from either of the other sides. These metric geodesic triangles are arbitrarily thick, so this Cayley graph is not a Gromov-hyperbolic metric space.
A tree is -hyperbolic. Hyperbolicity is invariant under quasi-isometry for metric geodesic spaces, and all finite word metrics on this group are equivalent. Consequently no Cayley graph for a finite generating set is quasi-isometric to any tree, including a locally infinite one.
For the First Chern class identity, use finite-dimensional classifying maps. A complex line bundle on a compact Hausdorff space embeds in a finite-dimensional trivial vector bundle, so it is a pullback vector bundle of the tautological bundle on some Complex projective space. For the two complex line bundles, the universal tensor product of vector bundles is classified by the map
Its restriction to either factor pulls the tautological bundle back to the tautological bundle on that factor. The degree-two cohomology of the product is the direct sum of the degree-two cohomology of its factors, so these two restrictions determine its First Chern class. Pulling back to proves
This proves the integral identity, including possible torsion elements in the cohomology of ; an argument using only curvature forms would not detect those torsion elements.
The splitting principle for complex vector bundles says that for a vector bundle there is an iterated projective bundle for which is injective on integral cohomology, and is a direct sum of complex line bundles. The same assertion holds with rational coefficients, and a common such space can split any finite collection of vector bundles. The injectivity follows at each stage from the projective bundle formula for complex vector bundles; a Hermitian metric splits the resulting filtration into a direct sum.
Write for the Chern roots of the pulled-back vector bundle. Define the degree- component of its Chern character by
The Fundamental theorem of symmetric polynomials expresses each power-sum symmetric polynomial uniquely as an integral polynomial in the elementary symmetric polynomials, which are the Chern classes of . Thus the definition makes sense on itself, without choosing actual Chern roots there. On a compact Hausdorff space, each vector bundle is classified by a finite-dimensional Grassmannian; its high-degree Chern character components therefore vanish. Hence this defines a class in the direct sum even if has no finite dimension. On more general spaces an infinite Chern character is instead interpreted in the product of the even-degree cohomology groups.
On a common splitting space, the Chern roots of a direct sum are the combined root lists, whereas the First Chern class identity makes the Chern roots of a tensor product of vector bundles the pairwise sums . Consequently
The injectivity in the splitting principle for complex vector bundles descends both identities to . Additivity extends the Chern character to the Grothendieck group by . Multiplicativity and then show that the Chern character is a unital ring homomorphism.
For Complex K-theory of complex projective space, let be the tautological bundle, put , and set . The cohomology ring of complex projective space is . The CW filtration gives a cofibration
The K-theory six-term exact sequence and Complex K-theory of a sphere give, inductively,
Here is the image of a Bott element from , normalized so that . This normalization follows from the multiplicative form of Bott periodicity: the Chern character of the degree-two Bott element is an integral generator, and multiplication yields the top-degree generator on . In particular, the abelian group is a free abelian group of rank .
Assume inductively that form an integral basis on . Their lifts, together with , form an integral basis on . Since
the Chern characters of this basis are linearly independent over : their first nonzero degrees are . Thus the Chern character is injective on . By induction restricts to zero on , so for an integer . Comparing Chern characters gives . Also , so . This proves the integral answer, rather than merely its rationalization:
The induction begins with a point and .
Use the standard complex K-theory Thom class convention. For a rank- complex vector bundle, its K-theory Euler class is the pullback of the K-theory Thom class along the zero section, namely
Here denotes an exterior power, and a Hermitian metric identifies the dual bundle with the conjugate vector bundle. Choosing instead changes the K-theory Euler class by the unit , so its kernel and cokernel computations are unchanged.
For the disk bundle and sphere bundle , the K-theory Thom class identifies with . The exact sequence of this pair becomes the K-theory Gysin sequence of a sphere bundle:
The groups are two-periodic by Bott periodicity.
View Real projective space as the circle bundle of over Complex projective space, where is the tautological bundle. Indeed, maps to by ; in each fiber squaring identifies exactly and .
Use Complex K-theory of complex projective space in the form
The K-theory Euler class of is . Multiplying it by the unit gives . The K-theory Gysin sequence of a sphere bundle therefore gives
Under the projection , the pullback vector bundle is the complexification of a real vector bundle of the tautological bundle of Real projective space: the fiber map sends to . Thus pulls back to . Put . The relation gives , and gives . Hence
For completeness, these relations give precisely the abelian group . In the basis , the image of multiplication by is generated by ; its relation matrix is triangular with determinant , and the relations express every as . Thus there is exactly one cyclic torsion subgroup of order .
If and is in the kernel, successive coefficients of give , , and so on, up to . Hence , with arbitrary. For the multiplier is zero on . In all cases,
Finally let with , over . Since , multiplicativity of the K-theory Euler class gives
On , the image of multiplication by this K-theory Euler class is the subgroup generated by : multiplication by an integer produces every such multiple, while multiplication by only adds multiples of . Therefore
Multiplication by is zero on , since and this abelian group has no nonzero torsion elements. Thus the K-theory Gysin sequence of a sphere bundle gives a short exact sequence
It splits as an exact sequence of abelian groups because its quotient is a free abelian group. Consequently
The convention covers and . For example, when the sphere bundle is , a mapping torus of the antipodal map; its Topological K-theory has no nonzero torsion elements, agreeing with the formula. If is allowed, the rank-zero vector bundle has an empty unit sphere bundle, so instead.
Take the free abelian group , whose rank of a group is two, and its finite-index subgroup . The subgroup has index two and is again isomorphic to , so its rank is two. The Nielsen–Schreier formula would instead give . Hence
is a counterexample.
Let be the surface with boundary obtained by deleting the interiors of the disks. By excision,
so and the other relative groups vanish. In the long exact sequence in relative homology, the map
sends an orientation class to , up to an overall choice of sign. It is therefore injective and has cokernel . Exactness gives and a short exact sequence
This sequence splits because its right-hand group is a free abelian group. Since is connected, we obtain
The Bott isomorphism is multiplication by the Bott element :
Together with the suspension isomorphism and
it gives the Complex K-theory of a sphere
Let
be a CW filtration in which each quotient is a wedge of even-dimensional spheres. The six-term exact sequence in Topological K-theory, the sphere calculation, and induction give
and a short exact sequence whose new summand in is free abelian on the newly attached cells. Every such extension splits as an extension of free abelian groups, so is free, with one generator for each cell. This proves the Complex K-theory of an even-cell complex result.
The exterior product defines
For a point it is the identity. Attaching one layer of even cells gives corresponding exact sequences on the source and target; the sphere case is the suspension isomorphism, and induction with the Five lemma proves that the product map remains an isomorphism. This is the Künneth theorem for complex K-theory with an even-cell factor.
For a mapping torus , the K-theory Wang sequence of a mapping torus contains
When , exactness gives
For , the Complex K-theory of complex projective space and the K-theory Künneth isomorphism give
The factor swap interchanges and . Its invariant subgroup has the basis
It follows that the K-theory of the mapping torus of the factor swap on two complex projective planes is
Primitive lattice element 2026-10-06
A nonzero element of a free abelian group is primitive when it is part of an integral basis, equivalently when some homomorphism to takes it to one. Its coordinates have greatest common divisor one. This lattice meaning differs from a primitive homology class in the coalgebra sense.