Continuity of straight-line homotopy (for f,g: X to S where S is a convex set)

61 Views Asked by At

I read that if $f,g: X\rightarrow C$ are continuous functions from a topological space to a convex set of an Euclidean space, then the function $F: X\times I\rightarrow C$ defined by $$ F(x,t) = (1-t)f(x) + tg(x) $$ is a straight-line homotopy from $f$ to $g$. May I wonder why is it continuous? I know that I should use the fact that the composition of continuous functions is continuous, and I proved that the function that sends $$ (x,t)\mapsto ((1-t,t),(f(x),g(x))) $$ is continuous, but I was stuck there. I was stuck on this example for about two hours so I really appreciate if someone could show me what the composition functions should look like.

Thanks!

1

There are 1 best solutions below

6
On BEST ANSWER

The sum of continuous functions is continuous (by composition with the continuous addition function), so if we can show $(t,x)\to tg(x)$ is continuous it should be clear that this is enough. But the scalar product map $\Bbb R\times\Bbb R^n\to\Bbb R^n$ is continuous and so are its restrictions and corestrictions.

It then suffices to show $(t,x)\to(t,g(x))$ is continuous but that’s really rather clear as it is simply $1\times g$ and the product of continuous functions is continuous.