Degree of the twist map $S^m\wedge S^n $ to itself.

63 Views Asked by At

Consider the map $S^m\times S^n \rightarrow S^n\times S^m$ which takes $(x,y)$ to $(y,x)$. This induces a map on the smash product $S^m\wedge S^n=S^{m+n}$. I am at a loss thinking what the degree of this map should be. I suspect it should be $(-1)^{mn}$ since it is a homeomorphism and should be a power of $-1$ and I am kind of permuting the coordinates and that is the sign of the desired permutation but don't know how to prove it.

Any help will be highly appreciated. Thanks.

1

There are 1 best solutions below

0
On

Concretely, the natural quotient map $S^m\times S^n \to S^m\wedge S^n \cong S^{n+m}$ is given by:$$ ((x_0,x_1,\cdots,x_m),(y_0,y_1,\cdots,y_n))\mapsto \left(\frac{x_1}{1-x_0},\cdots,\frac{x_m}{1-x_0},\frac{y_1}{1-y_0},\cdots,\frac{y_n}{1-y_0}\right) $$

On the left hand side here, we regard elements of $S^m$ (resp. $S^n$), as $m+1$- tuples (resp. $(n+1)$-tuples), which square sum to $1$. On the the right hand side we identify $S^{n+m}$ with $\mathbb{R}^{n+m}\cup \{\infty\}$.

Thus your map $S^{n+m}\to S^{n+m}$ is induced by the linear map $\mathbb{R}^{n+m}\to \mathbb{R}^{n+m}$ given by the matrix $$\left(\begin{array}{cc} 0 &I_n\\ I_m & 0 \end{array}\right)$$

Clearly this has determinant $(-1)^{(n+m+1)n}=(-1)^{nm}$.