Last time, we were discussing the category whose objects are pointed topological spaces and whose morphisms are pointed homotopy classes of basepoint-preserving maps. It turns out that the homotopy groups are functors from this category
to the category of groups.
The homotopy group functors are, however, representable. They are representable by
, where
is a base-point; this is equivalently
for
the
-cube and
the boundary. The fact that these are functors to the category of groups is equivalent to saying that
is a cogroup object in
.
But why should be a cogroup object? To answer this question, let us consider a pair of adjoint functors on
.
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