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In the nLab entry, suspension, it says that for CW complexes, suspension and reduced suspension agree up to weak homotopy equivalence.

My questions are:

  1. How to prove this result? Any reference would be okay for me.

  2. Is there any intuitive counterexample to see suspension and reduced suspension can disagree?

Edit: I should be more clear about my questions. So I add some updates as follows.

For question 1: According to Example 0.10 of Hatcher's Algebraic Topology, the reduced suspension is defined for any CW complex with a fixed point $x_{0}$ as $0$-cell. So as Hatcher says, we can shrink the 1-cell $x_{0}\times I$, which is possible to write down the homotopy we need. So I admit this question is weird. I should ask what if we don't need a fixed point.

Okay, I just realized that we can make any point as a $0$-cell (for example, see this MSE question).

For question 2: I have tried some common spaces that are not CW complexes. I find imagining those shapes does not provide any clear clue. I would like to know a clear and intuitive example, or, a solid proof for a space.

1 Answers1

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  1. The suspension $SX$ has $\{*\} \times I$ as a subcomplex. Since it is contractible, the map $SX \rightarrow \Sigma X$ from the unreduced to the reduced to the reduced suspension is a homotopy equivalence.

  2. If $Z=\{0\} \cup \{1,\frac{1}{2},\frac{1}{3},\dots\}$ with basepoint 0, it is a fun exercise to see that $SZ$ is not homotopy equivalent to $\Sigma Z$.

Connor Malin
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    I recommend using textbooks rather than nLab when it comes to introductory topology, the articles are very much not written for beginners. – Connor Malin Sep 28 '21 at 15:51
  • For the second point, I just noticed a detailed proof, see "https://math.stackexchange.com/a/540339/604972". – Thinknot Dec 08 '21 at 00:27