F. R. Cohen

ON THE HOMOLOGY OF CONFIGURATION SPACES

Configuration spaces appear in various contexts such as algebraic geometry, knot theory, differential topology or homotopy theory. Although intensively studied their homology is unknown except for special cases, see for example [ 1, 2, 7, 8, 9, 12, 13, 14, 18, 261 where different terminology and notation is used. In this article we study the Betti numbers of

James maps, Segal maps, and the Kahn-Priddy theorem

The standard combinatorial approximation C(R n, X) to Qn~nx is a filtered space with easily understood filtration quotients Di Rn, X). Stably, C( Rn, X) splits as the wedge of the Di Rn, X). We here analyze the multiplicative properties of the James maps which give rise to the splitting and of various related combinatorially derived maps between iterated loop spaces. The target of the total James map } := (}q): Qn~nx -,) X Q2nq~2nqDq( Rn, X)