Crossed complexes have longstanding uses, explicit and implicit, in homotopy theory and the cohomology of groups. It is here shown that the category of crossed complexes over groupoids has a symmetric monoidal closed structure in which the internal Hom functor is built from morphisms of crossed complexes, nonabelian chain homotopies between them and similar higher homotopies. The tensor product involves non-abelian constructions related to the commutator calculus and the homotopy addition lemma. This monoidal closed structure is derived from that on the equivalent category of ω-groupoids where the underlying cubical structure gives geometrically natural definitions of tensor products and homotopies.

Results on the niteness of induced crossed modules are proved both algebraically and topologically. Using the Van Kampen type theorem for the fundamental crossed module, applications are given to the 2-types of mapping cones of classifying spaces of groups. Calculations of the cohomology classes of some nite crossed modules are given, using crossed complex methods.

We obtain some explicit calculations of crossed Q-modules induced from a crossed module over a normal subgroup P of Q. By virtue of theorems of Brown and Higgins, this enables the computation of the homotopy 2-types and second homotopy modules of certain homotopy pushouts of maps of classifying spaces of discrete groups.

This paper is the second in a series exploring the properties of a functor which assigns a homotopy double groupoid with connections to a Hausdorff space. We show that this functor satisfies a version of the van Kampen theorem, and so is a suitable tool for nonabelian, 2-dimensional, local-to-global problems. The methods are analogous to those developed by Brown and Higgins for similar theorems for other higher homotopy groupoids. An integral part of the proof is a detailed discussion of commutative cubes in a double category with connections, and a proof of the key result that any composition of commutative cubes is commutative. These results have recently been generalised to all dimensions by Philip Higgins.

We outline the main features of the definitions and applications of crossed complexes and cubical #-groupoids with connections.

... L are simplicial sets, then there is a strong deformation retraction of the fundamental crossed complex of the cartesian product K \Theta L onto the tensor product of the fundamental crossed complexes of K and L. This satisfies various side-conditions and associativity/interchange laws, as for the chain complex version. Given simplicial sets K 0 ; : : : ; K r , we discuss the r-cube of homotopies induced on (K 0 \Theta : : : \Theta K r ) and show these form a coherent system. We introduce a definition of a double crossed complex, and of the associated total (or codiagonal) crossed complex. We introduce a definition of homotopy colimits of diagrams of crossed complexes. We show that the homotopy colimit of crossed complexes can be expressed as the

It has been difficult to see precisely the role played by strict n-categories in the nascent theory of n-categories, particularly as related to n-truncated homotopy types of spaces. We propose to show in a fairly general setting that one cannot obtain all 3-types by any reasonable realization functor 1 from strict 3-groupoids (i.e. groupoids in the sense of [20]). More precisely we show that one does not obtain the 3-type of S 2. The basic reason is that the Whitehead bracket is nonzero. This phenomenon is actually well-known, but in order to take into account the possibility of an arbitrary reasonable realization functor we have to write the argument in a particular way. We start by recalling the notion of strict n-category. Then we look at the notion of strict n-groupoid as defined by Kapranov and Voevodsky [20]. We show that their definition is equivalent to a couple of other natural-looking definitions (one of these equivalences was left as an exercise in [20]). At the end of these first sections, we have a picture of strict 3-groupoids having only one object and one 1-morphism, as being equivalent to abelian monoidal objects (G, +) in the category of groupoids, such that (π0(G), +) is a group. In the case in question, this group will be π2(S 2) = Z. Then comes the main

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All spaces are assumed to be locally path connected and semi-locally 1-connected. Let X be a connected topological group with identity e, and let p: ˜ X → X be the universal cover of the underlying space of X. It follows easily from classical properties of lifting maps to covering spaces that for any point ˜e in ˜ X with p˜e = e there is a unique structure of topological group on ˜ X such that ˜e is the