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Allen Hatcher
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A homological criterion for collapsibility?
The lemma as stated certainly seems false, with the counterexamples you described such as the house with two rooms, with $A$ a point. Surely K & S knew examples like this, so I wonder what they really had in mind when they stated this lemma.
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Contractibility of space of embeddings of a disc
@IgorBelegradek: The formula seems to work equally well for embeddings $D^2\to {\mathbb R}^2$ and diffeomorphisms of ${\mathbb R}^2$. For embeddings the term $f(tx)$ is in effect restricting embeddings to smaller and smaller concentric disks, so one still gets embeddings, and then the $1/t$ factor re-expands to keep the derivative the identity at the origin. The limit exists, just as for diffeomorphisms, and is the identity.
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Contractibility of space of embeddings of a disc
For question 2 the space is not contractible. There is a map from the space of topological embeddings to ${\mathbb R}^2 - \{0\}$ given by $f\mapsto f(1,0)$ and this map splits (i.e., has a section) by considering only embeddings which are orientation-preserving Euclidean similarities. So the space is not simply-connected. An extra condition analogous to the condition on the derivative in question 1 is needed, though it is perhaps not obvious what the best way to state this condition is.
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Contractibility of space of embeddings of a disc
Please clarify what you mean by "proper". Usually a proper embedding is one which takes boundary to boundary, which in this case would force the embeddings to be diffeomorphisms or homeomorphisms, respectively, in the two cases.
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Existence of $n$-connected topological groups with $m$-dimensional action extending that of $GL(m)$ on $\mathbb{R}^m$
A simple observation: $F$ must be non-orientable, since if it is orientable, then $G$, being path-connected, must act by orientation-preserving homeomorphisms, contrary to the fact that the action of $GL(m)$ on ${\mathbb R}^m$ includes orientation-reversing homeomorphisms.
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"Economic" CW-structure for Eilenberg-MacLane spaces?
JUst to clarify: The usual construction of a homology decomposition, as in my algebraic topology book for example, shows that for each simply-connected space $X$ with finitely generated homology groups there is a CW complex $Y$ and a weak homotopy equivalence $Y\to X$, where $Y$ has the minimum number of cells in each dimension consistent with the structure of $H_*(X;{\mathbb Z})$, namely, 1 cell for each infinite cyclic summand of the homology and 2 cells for each finite cyclic summand. This applies in particular for $K(\pi,n)$'s with $n>1$ and $\pi$ finitely generated.
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Inverse cohomological isomorphisms
@Lennart Meier: Yes, thanks. Corrected now.
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Inverse cohomological isomorphisms
Correction: The universal covering map $S^3 \to SO(3)/I$ has degree 120, the order of the fundamental group of $SO(3)/I$.
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