Axiomatic Sectional category, Topological complexity, and Homotopic distance

Abstract

Many of the properties of sectional category, topological complexity and homotopic distance are in fact derived from a small number of basic properties, which, once established, lead to all the others without further recourse to topology. On the other hand, there are several variants of these notions: with open covers or else Whitehead-Ganea constructions, also with spaces and maps that are unpointed or else pointed, fibrewise, equivariant, etc. or even with algebraic models of spaces and maps. These are two reasons why we build an axiomatic approach to all these notions, based on just three simple axioms. We also introduce the notion of `lifting category' which unifies the notions of sectional category, topological complexity, and homotopic distance, all of which are special cases of lifting category.