(1)  

is short exact, or that: . If you want to know more about exact sequences I recommend reading this.

It turns out that on the level of homology this short exact sequence turns into a long exact sequence:

(2)  

and the map is called the connecting homomorphism.

The natural question to ask is: What is ? If you read the aforementioned authoritative text on the subject you will see that is not explicitly defined, but its existence is merely proved.

After asking Henry I was able to see how given a particular and , one is able to come up with an idea of what the map does, but no general technique for computing the map for arbitrary input. I will now show you how to do this [with simplicial spaces for simplicity], and finite fields [so that this is actually correct].

The plan is to follow a diagram chase that goes like this:

Since we are given a representation of we can begin by taking a relative cycle . What we want to do is produce a chain in from  with the property that in . Such a chain is called a lift.

Assuming we have computed the lift we can compute , and it turns out that (because ), which means that . So our mapping sends to . So if you are a mathematician, you prove that this process is well defined, and this ends your diagram chase. Unless of course you are Mr. Cooperman, or, a computer scientist.

If you are a computer scientist you might be dissatisfied because it is not entirely clear how is presented. Indeed itself is not unique as it depends on our choice of lift, is likely itself not a member of our given representative for homology on .

The problem we have is that so far our cycle is written down as a linear combination of cells. We want an equivalent representation in terms of cycles. Noether, the mother of modern algebra, says we can write down .
This tells us that we can use our homology basis to form a basis for our cycle group, and its not to hard to see that we can extend the cycle group to a basis for all chains. However in our case we want to take a cycle expressed in the chain basis, and write it as a linear combination of given cycles. This amounts to being able to write down a rectangular change of basis matrix between the cell basis and the given cycle basis on .

The column space of this matrix would be given by our given cycle basis, and the row space would be given by the canonical cell basis for . We then look to “solve ” over (in this blog ), in the sense that we want to write down a linear combination of the cycles in apply our matrix and end up with the we computed.

Consider this space :

which is homotopic to an annulus.

We can imagine that , and that is obtained by gluing a disc onto the boundary of , so that is itself homotopic to a disc, is then homotopic to a sphere, with exactly one non-trivial 2nd homology class. The boundary of this class would be the outermost cycle of .

Lets say that we are provided a basis for and . If I want to express the outer bounding cycle in this basis, I begin by writing down the change of basis matrix, in order to solve I augment the matrix with the identity matrix on the right and on the bottom.

Now you can see that modulo our extra row for our matrix is in row echelon form, and it suffices to perform one Gaussian elimination (over ) in this last column to achieve our result:

Notice how the right hand side now contains our vector and indeed .

github

Features Coming Soon:
- Text and LaTeX using MathJax
Bug fixes to come:
- Networking bugs to be worked out.