most recent 30 from http://mathoverflow.net 2013-06-19T03:56:59Z http://mathoverflow.net/feeds/question/20361 http://www.creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/2.5/rdf http://mathoverflow.net/questions/20361/verb-form-of-homotopy-homotope Kevin Walker 2010-04-05T03:45:20Z 2010-04-05T18:21:15Z

<p>Is there a transitive verb, in common use, which means 'deform via a homotopy'? I used to think 'homotope' was the answer, but it produces surprisingly few relevant matches on Google, so now I have my doubts. I want to be able to say things like "By Lemma 17 we can homotope the k-cells (rel boundary) into the subspace Y". I am well aware that I could rearrange the sentence to say something like "...there is a homotopy such that...", but that's not what I want to do. I want a simple, one-word verb with this meaning. I suppose 'deform' might work, but it's not as specific as I would like.</p> <p>Another form of this question: Does the use of 'homotope' in the sample sentence of the previous paragraph sound strange? Sound standard and idiomatic?</p>

http://mathoverflow.net/questions/20361/verb-form-of-homotopy-homotope/20402#20402 Kevin Walker 2010-04-05T18:21:15Z 2010-04-05T18:21:15Z

<p>Since all of the responses thus far have been in the form of comments rather than answers, I'll summarize the results in this answer.</p> <p>Of the first seven people to comment, all thought that "homotope" was a bit informal. Four commenters thought it was fine to use in print, while three thought it should be avoided in formal papers.</p> <p>I did a full-text arXiv search, and found 408 occurrences of "homotoped" and 362 occurrences of "homotope". (I looked at only the mathematics sections, not physics etc.)</p>