Some remarks on hypergestural homology of spaces and its relation to classical homology

Abstract

Classical homology of a topological space provides invariants of the space by means of triangulation or squaring made up from singular simplices (simplicial homology) or singular cubes (cubical homology) in the space. In much the same way, Mazzola's hypergestural homology intends to associate invariants to topological categories and, in particular, topological spaces by means of approximation with hypergestures playing the role of singular simplices and singular cubes. In this article, we locate Mazzola's hypergestural homology as a special kind of abstract cubical homology and propose two variations of Mazzola's construction, corresponding to simple geometric and physical interpretations of boundaries of hypergestures. Moreover, we discuss the relationship between hypergestural homology and classical cubical homology and prove that in many cases, one of our hypergestural homologies is invariant under homotopy equivalence of spaces, which is the main result of the article. Also, based on some examples, several structural improvements of hypergestural homology are suggested. However, one of these examples suggests that hypergestural homology could provide combinatorial information about a topological space beyond classical homology. Our computations are based on an explicit presentation of hypergestures, not included in previous works on gesture theory. This article has an Online Supplement, in which we expose some technical details, including the proof of the main result.