Roots of Unity

What We Talk about When We Talk about

Holes
For Halloween, I wrote about a very scary topic: higher homotopy groups.
Homotopy is an idea in topology, the field of math concerned with
properties of shapes that stay the same no matter how you squish or stretch
them, as long as you don’t tear them or glue things together.

By Evelyn Lamb on December 25, 2014

 A demonstration that a tube of toothpaste has a two-dimensional hole.
Image: Slipp D. Thomson, via Flickr.

For Halloween, I wrote about a very scary topic: higher homotopy

groups. Homotopy is an idea in topology, the field of math
concerned with properties of shapes that stay the same no matter
how you squish or stretch them, as long as you don't tear them or
glue things together. Both homotopy groups and the somewhat
related homology groups are different ways to describe the
topology of shapes using algebra. In my post, I said that homology
detects “holes” of different dimensions. But, as one commenter
asked, what do I mean by holes of different dimensions?

Good question! I deliberately used “hole” as a wiggle word because

there isn’t a real mathematical definition of hole. But here’s my
short answer that is also the reason I’m not an algebraic topologist.
If you can put it on a necklace, it has a one-dimensional hole. If
you can fill it with toothpaste, it has a two-dimensional hole. For
holes of higher dimensions, you’re on your own.

That answer isn’t very satisfying. Is there a better way to describe

holes? I talked with some of my topologist friends and discovered
two things: topologists don't all agree on what a hole is, and it's
fun and interesting to think about different interpretations of a
word whose mathematical definition isn't completely settled. I
think my larger conclusion, in the spirit of the season, is that holes
are like Santa Claus: the true meaning is in your heart. So let's look
into our hearts and think about what holes are.

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The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy has an amusing entry

about holes by Robert Casati and Achille Varzi. It starts:

Holes are an interesting case study for

ontologists and epistemologists. Naive, untutored
descriptions of the world treat holes as objects of
reference, on a par with ordinary material
objects. (‘There are as many holes in the cheese as
 there are cookies in the tin.’) And we often appeal
to holes to account for causal interactions, or to
explain the occurrence of certain events. (‘the
water ran out because of the hole in the
bucket.’)Hence there is prima facie evidence for
the existence of such entities. Yet it might be
argued that reference to holes is just a façon de
parler, that holes are mere entia
representationis, as-if entities, fictions.

Luckily we are mathematicians, not philosophers, so we don’t need

to concern ourselves too much with the trivial detail of whether or
not holes exist. (Some also take this approach with Santa Claus.)

I have to warn you that this post will end up being a little circular.
In some sense, the mathematical definition of an n-dimensional
hole "should be" something that causes the n-dimensional
homology or homotopy group to have something interesting in it,
or to be nontrivial.
A basketball has a hole in it. Image: Public domain, via Wikimedia
Commons.

The Mathworld entry on holes has a definition by Eric Weisstein

that I like a lot: “A hole in a mathematical object is a topological
structure which prevents the object from being continuously
shrunk to a point.”

Let’s think about a basketball. Using Weisstein's definition, it

definitely has a hole in it because you can’t squish it all the way
down to a point without changing its basketballiness.
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I like this definition because it’s intuitive, but I think it's a bit
dangerous because there are a few different notions of being
continuously shrunk to a point that are used in topology, and it’s
easy to get them confused. (Trust me. I have lived it.) A circle in
the plane can be continuously shrunk to a point,* but intuitively,
and in the sense of homotopy and homology, a circle has a hole in
it. That notion of shrinking, however, relies on the assumption
that the circle is sitting in a 2-dimensional plane, so it’s really
telling us something about the topology of the plane, not the
topology of the circle. We need our definition not to rely on how
something is sitting in space.

The notion of being shrunk down to a point that Weisstein’s

definition uses requires us to retain topological equivalence the
whole time. We can’t shrink a circle down to a point because we'd
end up tearing or squishing something together at the end.

What about defining the dimension of a hole? That's trickier. A

tempting definition, and the definition that one of my topologist
friends prefers, is that an n-dimensional hole in a manifold is a
place where the manifold is "like" the n-sphere. (For our purposes,
a one-dimensional sphere is a circle, a two-dimensional sphere is
basketball-shaped, and so on. This is because up close, a circle
looks like a line, and a sphere looks like a plane.) More rigorously,
an n-dimensional hole in an object is something that prevents
some map of the n-sphere into the object from being shrunk down
into a point without leaving the object. This definition of a hole
would mean that we were equating hole-ishness to homotopy.
Let's work out some examples.

First, a plane. You can't put it on a necklace or fill it with

toothpaste, so it probably doesn't have a hole. Let's check. There
are lots of different ways to map a circle into a plane, but all of
them can be shrunk down into points while staying on the plane.
In other words, there's no obstruction to scooting a rubber band
around the plane and shrinking it down as much as we want. So by
our working definition, a plane has no one-dimensional holes.
That's good because if the plane has a hole, we our definition of a
hole is wrong.
 We can tell the punctured plane has a hole because we can't pull the orange
loop past the missing point, outlined in blue. Image: Evelyn Lamb.

What about the plane with one point removed? We still can't fill it
with toothpaste, but given a really thin chain, we could put it on a
necklace, so it should have a one-dimensional hole. How can we
see that? If we map a circle into the plane, and the removed point
is inside the circle, we have a problem. (Pedants might point out
that I haven’t proved that there’s such a thing as an inside and and
outside of a map of a circle into a plane, hole or no. You’re right,
and you can go write your own blog post about it. The rest of us
will just assume that we can find a circle map polite enough to
have a clearly defined inside and outside.) We can’t pull or shrink
the circle past that point, so we know that the plane minus a point
has a one-dimensional hole.
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Now back to the basketball we talked about earlier. We know it has

a hole. What dimension is its hole? You can't put it on a necklace,
but you can fill it with toothpaste, so it's probably two-
dimensional. Now to check it. It has no one-dimensional holes
because any way you put a rubber band (or circle) on the
basketball, you can shrink it down until it's a single point without
leaving the surface of the basketball. But it does have a two-
dimensional hole because you can’t continuously shrink every map
of a two-sphere into the space down to one point without leaving
the basketball. (To pick the low-hanging fruit, if your map from a
basketball to a basketball is the identity map, where everything
stays in the same place, you can't shrink it down to one point.)

So far, the definition of hole we're using seems promising. But in

the end, I don't think it's the best one.
The two highlighted loops on the torus show us the two different one-
dimensional holes. Image: YassineMrabet, via Wikimedia Commons.

Let's look at the torus, one of the simplest topological spaces. The
torus can be thought of as the glaze of a donut or the surface of an
inner tube. We can put it on a necklace or fill it with toothpaste, so
it should have one- and two-dimensional holes. Everything is fine
for one-dimensional holes: there are basically two main ways a
map of a circle can fail to shrink down to a point on a torus. Either
it can go around the hole of the donut (the blue circle in the image
to the left), or it can be like the circle your fingers would make if
you stuck your thumb through the hole of the donut and grasped it
with your first finger (the red circle in the image to the left). So the
torus has two one-dimensional holes. (You don't find them both
with the necklace definition unless you stand inside the torus to
wear one of the necklaces.)
Our working definition breaks down when we get to two-
dimensional holes. A torus "should" have a two-dimensional hole,
but we can't find it using maps of two-spheres. (This isn't obvious,
at least to me. You can think about trying to wrap a balloon around
an inner tube to get an idea of what's going on.)

Our definition of hole in terms of maps of spheres doesn’t work for

the two-dimensional hole in the torus, but I’d really like to say the
hole is there. I think the right answer, though it doesn't seem
particularly insightful, is to define hole the same way but allow
maps of any two-dimensional things instead of just spheres. There
is a two-dimensional thing we can map into the torus that can’t be
shrunk down to a point while staying on the torus, and it’s the
torus itself. So if we know that the torus isn't topologically
equivalent to a point, we know that it has a two-dimensional hole.
This kind of seems like an "I know it when I see it" definition, and
it isn't very helpful in practice. If we don't know much about an
object, how will we know which one of the infinitely many two-
dimensional surfaces to map into it to test its holiness? But this a
version of this notion, defined more precisely, is homology. (For
the ambitious, you can read more about it in Allen Hatcher’s free
Algebraic Topology textbook. It’s worth noting that Hatcher
always uses scare quotes around the word hole because he never
defines it.)
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There are several ways to define homology, but to me the most

intuitive is by taking some fundamental building blocks—vertices,
edges, faces, and so on—and looking at how they get stuck together
to make the surface. Although it's more subtle than this, homology
basically tells you which building blocks of a certain dimension
don’t bound higher-dimensional building blocks in your space.
This works with the ideas of holes we’ve already seen: the two
distinct holes in the torus come from (one-dimensional) circles
that don't go around around a (two-dimensional) solid disk in the
space. The two-dimensional hole comes from the fact that the
torus is only made up of two-dimensional and smaller
components, so its two-dimensional components don’t bound any
three-dimensional parts of the surface. On the other hand, a solid
torus (the whole donut) doesn’t have any two-dimensional parts
that aren’t the boundary of three-dimensional parts, so it doesn’t
have a two-dimensional hole. (The two-dimensional hole of the
donut glaze is now filled with three-dimensional bread. Which is
much better than toothpaste.)
 A visualization of the Hopf fibration, which demonstrates the surprising
fact that a basketball has a three-dimensional hole. Image: Niles Johnson,
via Wikimedia Commons.

Mathematicians often refer to homology alone as detecting holes,

leaving homotopy—and our earlier working definition of n-
dimensional holes—high and dry. One advantage of this definition
is that we'll never have a higher-dimensional hole in a lower-
dimensional space, a disturbing prospect that is the reason I find
higher homotopy groups spooky. If we allow the homotopy-based
definition of hole, a basketball has a three-dimensional hole. (So I
guess it can be filled with whatever four-dimensional beings use to
brush their teeth.) The Hopf fibration, which I also mentioned in
my earlier post, is a map from the three-sphere to the two-sphere
that can’t shrink down to a point.

So with holes, you get a choice of what definition you like the best.
I think I prefer to use the homology definition, but there's
something beautiful about the idea that different hole-detectors
can detect different holes, so I might try to open my heart—which
for simplicity I'm assuming is topologically equivalent to a two-
sphere—and let the three-dimensional hole in.

If you made it this far, you deserve a treat. How about a

demonstration that a two-sphere filled with watermelon flesh
doesn't have a one-dimensional hole?

Rubber bands vs Water Melon - The Slow Mo Guys

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Thanks to Arunima Ray and two Christopher Davises
(Christophers Davis?) for their helpful comments about this post.
Anything you didn't like is my fault.

*Recipe for shrinking a circle to a point in the plane: start with a

circle of radius 1, and for convenience, set it down at the point
(0,0). We'll define a two-variable shrinking map. The first variable
will represent a point on the circle, which we’ll identify by angle
(measured counterclockwise from the x-axis). The second variable
represents time. I can shrink any circle down to a point over the
time interval from 0 to 1 with the map F(a,t)=(1-t)a. At any time w
strictly between 0 and 1, the image of this map is a circle of radius
1-w. At time 1, we have a “circle” of radius 0, which is also known
as a point. Maps like this are used all the time as examples of
explicit homotopies between paths.

The views expressed are those of the author(s) and are not necessarily those of Scientific
American.

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ABOUT THE AUTHOR(S)

 Evelyn Lamb
Evelyn Lamb is a freelance math and science writer based
in Salt Lake City, Utah.

Scientific American is part of Springer Nature, which owns or has commercial relations with thousands
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