Score: 0

Classifying covering types in homotopy type theory

Published: December 10, 2025 | arXiv ID: 2512.10064v1

By: Samuel Mimram, Émile Oleon

Potential Business Impact:

Maps shapes to understand their hidden connections.

Business Areas:
Optical Communication Hardware

Covering spaces are a fundamental tool in algebraic topology because of the close relationship they bear with the fundamental groups of spaces. Indeed, they are in correspondence with the subgroups of the fundamental group: this is known as the Galois correspondence. In particular, the covering space corresponding to the trivial group is the universal covering, which is a "1-connected" variant of the original space, in the sense that it has the same homotopy groups, except for the first one which is trivial. In this article, we formalize this correspondence in homotopy type theory, a variant of Martin-Löf type theory in which types can be interpreted as spaces (up to homotopy). Along the way, we develop an n-dimensional generalization of covering spaces. Moreover, in order to demonstrate the applicability of our approach, we formally classify the covering of lens spaces and explain how to construct the Poincaré homology sphere.

Page Count
19 pages

Category
Computer Science:
Logic in Computer Science