Comparing the orthogonal and homotopy functor calculi

Abstract

Goodwillie's homotopy functor calculus constructs a Taylor tower of approximations to F, often a functor from spaces to spaces. Weiss's orthogonal calculus provides a Taylor tower for functors from vector spaces to spaces. In particular, there is a Weiss tower associated to the functor which sends a vector space V to F evaluated at the one-point compactification of V. In this paper, we give a comparison of these two towers and show that when F is analytic the towers agree up to weak equivalence. We include two main applications, one of which gives as a corollary the convergence of the Weiss Taylor tower of BO. We also lift the homotopy level tower comparison to a commutative diagram of Quillen functors, relating model categories for Goodwillie calculus and model categories for the orthogonal calculus.