Presentations of the first homotopy groups of the unitary groups

Abstract

We describe explicit presentations of all stable and the first nonstable homotopy groups of the unitary groups. In particular, for each n >= 2 we supply n homotopic maps that each represent the (n-1)!-th power of a suitable generator of pi_2n(U(n)) = Z_{n!}. The product of these n commuting maps is the constant map to the identity matrix.