Rips complexes and covers in the uniform category

Abstract

James \cite{Jam} introduced uniform covering maps as an analog of covering maps in the topological category. Subsequently Berestovskii and Plaut \cite{BP3} introduced a theory of covers for uniform spaces generalizing their results for topological groups \cite{BP1}-\cite{BP2}. Their main concepts are discrete actions and pro-discrete actions, respectively. In case of pro-discrete actions Berestovskii and Plaut provided an analog of the universal covering space and their theory works well for the so-called coverable spaces. As will be seen in Section \ref{SECTION-Comparison}, \cite{BP3} generalizes only regular covering maps in topology and pro-discrete actions may not be preserved by compositions. In this paper we redefine the uniform covering maps and we generalize pro-discrete actions using Rips complexes and the chain lifting property. We expand the concept of generalized paths of Krasinkiewicz and Minc \cite{KraMin}.