Journal of the London Mathematical Society Advance Access originally published online on November 20, 2007
Journal of the London Mathematical Society 2007 76(3):757-776; doi:10.1112/jlms/jdm069
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© 2007 London Mathematical Society
On the number of homotopy types of fibres of a definable map
School of Mathematics
Georgia Institute of Technology
Atlanta
GA 30332
USA
saugata.basu{at}math.gatech.edu
Department of Computer Science
University of Bath
Bath BA2 7AY
United Kingdom
In this paper we prove a single exponential upper bound on the number of possible homotopy types of the fibres of a Pfaffian map in terms of the format of its graph. In particular, we show that if a semi-algebraic set S
Rm+n, where R is a real closed field, is defined by a Boolean formula with s polynomials of degree less than d, and
: Rm+n
Rn is the projection on a subspace, then the number of different homotopy types of fibres of
does not exceed s2(m+1)n(2m nd)O(nm). As applications of our main results we prove single exponential bounds on the number of homotopy types of semi-algebraic sets defined by fewnomials, and by polynomials with bounded additive complexity. We also prove single exponential upper bounds on the radii of balls guaranteeing local contractibility for semi-algebraic sets defined by polynomials with integer coefficients.
2000 Mathematics Subject Classification 14P10, 14P25, 32B20.
The first author was supported in part by an NSF Career Award 0133597 and a Alfred P. Sloan Foundation Fellowship. The second author was supported in part by the European RTN Network RAAG (contract HPRN-CT-2001-00271).
Received May 18, 2006; revised February 26, 2007; published online November 20, 2007.