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H is for Homology
A life belt, a coffee cup, a jumping ball, a beach ball - what do these objects have in common? What sets them apart? It is questions like these that are considered in
the mathematical field called topology. A method to study these questions is given by the theory of homology.
We can think of homology as a perspective that allows one to distinguish shapes and forms disregarding changes made by stretching and bending. For example,
homology sees no difference between the beach ball and the jumping ball, which can be constructed from the ball shape by pulling out two fingers. No cutting and no
glueing is necessary for this deformation. However, if we wanted to obtain a life belt from a beach ball, we could not just bend the beach ball into shape, but we would
need to cut and glue in various places. This is the reason why according to homology those objects are not the same. Loosely speaking, homology counts the
voids/holes and components of an object.
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Mathematically, homology associates a number of algebraic objects to topological spaces such as beach balls and life belts. There are different types of homology
theories. For example, in simplicial homology, one simplifies topological spaces by using building blocks such as points, edges between points, triangles (consisting of
three points, three edges and a face), tetrahedra etc., which are called simplices. One can combine these building blocks into scaffolds of the topological space, called
simplicial complexes. For example, we can use the following scaffolds for the beach ball and life belt:
The applications of homology are manifold(s). For example, within mathematics one can prove that there is no possibility to deform a two-dimensional space into a
three-dimensional space. Oxford researchers Frances Kirwan and Ulrike Tillmann use homology for their work on moduli spaces of Riemann surfaces. In computer
science, Oxford scientist Samson Abramsky uses homology in his research on contextuality. Even in biology, there are applications of homology to study the vast
amount of data that is available. A method that is used by Oxford mathematicians Peter Grindrod, Heather Harrington, Florian Klimm, Barbara Mahler, Nina Otter,
Mason Porter, Bernadette Stolz and Ulrike Tillmann on biological data is persistent homology. They use this method to for example study diseases such as cancer, and
processes in the human brain.
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