Communities

Writing
Writing
Codidact Meta
Codidact Meta
The Great Outdoors
The Great Outdoors
Photography & Video
Photography & Video
Scientific Speculation
Scientific Speculation
Cooking
Cooking
Electrical Engineering
Electrical Engineering
Judaism
Judaism
Languages & Linguistics
Languages & Linguistics
Software Development
Software Development
Mathematics
Mathematics
Christianity
Christianity
Code Golf
Code Golf
Music
Music
Physics
Physics
Linux Systems
Linux Systems
Power Users
Power Users
Tabletop RPGs
Tabletop RPGs
Community Proposals
Community Proposals
tag:snake search within a tag
answers:0 unanswered questions
user:xxxx search by author id
score:0.5 posts with 0.5+ score
"snake oil" exact phrase
votes:4 posts with 4+ votes
created:<1w created < 1 week ago
post_type:xxxx type of post
Search help
Notifications
Mark all as read See all your notifications »
Q&A

Post History

#1: Initial revision by user avatar Derek Elkins‭ · 2021-05-23T22:22:28Z (almost 3 years ago)
Probably one of the simpler ways of establishing this is reducing it to a case where you already know the answer. I will assume that you have proven at some point that the circle, $\mathbb S^1$, is not simply connected. Simple connectedness is a topological property so it is preserved by homeomorphism. Another important and useful fact about simply connected spaces is that a retract of a simply connected space is simply connected. The proof outline is then simply to show that the circle is a retract of $M$ and thus $M$ can't have been simply connected.

A **retraction** of a space $X$ onto a subspace $A \subseteq X$ is a continuous function $r : X \to A$ such that $\forall a \in A. r(a) = a$. We say that $A$ is a **retract** of $X$ if there exists a retraction $X \to A$.

The function $r(x,y,z) = ((y-1)^2 + (z-1)^2)^{-\frac{1}{2}}(0, y, z)$ is a retraction $M \to \mathbb S^1$ where we're identifying $\mathbb S^1$ with unit circle in the $yz$-plane centered at $(0, 1, 1)$. You should prove that this is a continuous function. (It clearly would *not* be continuous if we didn't omit the line $y = z = 1$.) Intuitively, this projects to the $yz$-plane and then maps each point on a ray in the $yz$-plane starting at $(0, 1, 1)$ to the corresponding point at unit distance from $(0, 1, 1)$. To be nitpicky, you should also prove that the subset of $M$ we were calling $\mathbb S^1$ is, in fact, homeomorphic to the circle. Alternatively, you can just directly prove that this subspace is not simply connected.

See [these lecture notes](https://sites.math.washington.edu/~lee/Courses/441-2012/simplyconn.pdf?v2) for discussion and proofs of the subresults, though I recommend attempting to prove them yourself first if you haven't already.