Remark on a theorem of E.H. Brown

Abstract

The proliferation of classifying spaces in recent years owes much to the theorem of Edgar H. Brown, Jr on the representability of homotopy functors. Since the theorem only gives a representation for functors defined on the category of spaces having the homotopy type of a CW complex, there is some interest in finding conditions under which the domain category may be enlarged. It appears that a version of the theorem holds for any small full subcategory of Htp, the category of topological spaces and homotopy classes of continuous maps, but that the resulting classifying space is generally intractable.