Spaces With Complexity One

Abstract

An $A$-cellular space is a space built from $A$ and its suspensions, analogously to the way that $CW$-complexes are built from $S^0$ and its suspensions. The $A$-cellular approximation of a space $X$ is an $A$-cellular space $CW_{A}X$ which is closest to $X$ among all $A$-cellular spaces. The $A$-complexity of a space $X$ is an ordinal number that quantifies how difficult it is to build an $A$-cellular approximation of $X$. In this paper, we study spaces with low complexity. In particular we show that if $A$ is a sphere localized at a set of primes then the $A$-complexity of each space $X$ is at most 1.