Timeline for Verb form of 'homotopy'? 'Homotope'?
Current License: CC BY-SA 2.5
13 events
| when toggle format | what | by | license | comment | |
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| Aug 11, 2011 at 21:31 | comment | added | Jim Conant | This reminds me of my first paper, which the referee had very strong stylistic opinions about. I had used the phrase "We induct on n," which the referee really didn't like. He also disliked saying things like "The $\alpha_j$" to mean the collection $\{\alpha_j\}$ varying over an index set. Some people really feel strongly about this kind of thing. | |
| Apr 5, 2010 at 20:43 | comment | added | HJRW | We're fast discovering who's never read Allen's book! :) | |
| Apr 5, 2010 at 18:31 | comment | added | Ryan Budney | Zoran, the cat has been out of the box for some time in that this is a phrase I've been using since my undergrad years. I'm pretty sure I've heard senior figures like Siebenmann use this phrase. So this is likely as old a phrase as any in topology. Moreover, the context for which kind of homotopy is usually clear when the phrase is used so it's not confusing unless the author chooses to make it so. | |
| Apr 5, 2010 at 18:21 | answer | added | Kevin Walker | timeline score: 8 | |
| Apr 5, 2010 at 12:38 | comment | added | Zoran Skoda | Your sentence "we can homotope..." is totally confusing to me and I would strongly discourage you from inveting such phrases. I see no point in being ONE word, or in abbreviations which make things obscure in general. In geometry the deformations may not be only parametrized by time and continuous but also of some smoothness class. Homotopy theory has a variety of related more complicated notions e.g. deformation retract, deformed mod boundary, isotopic etc. and I see no need to add strange shortcuts to those. | |
| Apr 5, 2010 at 10:36 | comment | added | Allen Hatcher | It occurs 19 times in the bible, oops, I mean in my algebraic topology book (ha!). But the style of the book is a little informal. Of the 19, 12 are in the form "homotoped" as in "can be homotoped" or "has been homotoped". So obviously I think it's a fine word, and I wouldn't want to do without it. There's also the issue of how to pronounce it, the main choice being between a long or short final "o". I lean toward the long "o", which is why I spell it homotope rather than homotop, but this may be a British vs. American English thing. | |
| Apr 5, 2010 at 5:25 | comment | added | Tom Leinster | I'm used to seeing it spelt "homotop" (like "develop"). But I wouldn't expect to see it at all in a formal paper. | |
| Apr 5, 2010 at 4:29 | comment | added | Omar Antolín-Camarena | I'm pretty sure that (1) I've never read "homotope" in a paper or book, and (2) I hear it and say it all the time. My guess is it's considered "informal". If you can contribute towards making it socially acceptable in print, please do so. | |
| Apr 5, 2010 at 4:26 | comment | added | Reid Barton | I would say "homotope" is common in speech but somewhat informal. I would be a little surprised to see it in a paper. | |
| Apr 5, 2010 at 4:09 | comment | added | Kevin Walker | Ryan: That's very helpful -- thanks for the quick response. Sammy: I agree with your sentiment re prescriptivists. | |
| Apr 5, 2010 at 4:05 | comment | added | Sammy Black | If you can "google", then you can "homotope". The meaning is evident, so it's a word--linguistic prescriptivists be damned! | |
| Apr 5, 2010 at 3:53 | comment | added | Ryan Budney | I just did a quick "grep -r homotope *" search in my TeX directory. Three of my papers use the word homotope in the way you use it. Sounds fine to me. I also say it quite a bit in talks. I use the word "isotope" vs "isotopy" in the same way, as well. That sounds a little more strange since isotope has another meaning. | |
| Apr 5, 2010 at 3:45 | history | asked | Kevin Walker | CC BY-SA 2.5 |