Michi’s blog » archive for January, 2009

Homological Inclusion-Exclusion and the Mayer-Vietoris sequence

  • January 9th, 2009

This blogpost is inspired to a large part by comments made by Rob Ghrist, in connection to his talks on using the Euler characteristic integration theory to count targets detected by sensor networks.

He pointed out that the underlying principle inducing the rule
\chi(A\cup B) = \chi(A)+\chi(B)-\chi(A\cap B)
goes under many names, among those \emph{Inclusion-Exclusion}, favoured among computer scientists (and combinatoricists). He also pointed out that the origin of this principle is the Mayer-Vietoris long exact sequence
\cdots\to H_{n}(A\cap B)\to H_{n}(A)\oplus H_{n}(B)\to H_{n}(A\cup b)\to\cdots

In this blog post, I’d like to give more meat to this assertion as well as point out how the general principle of Inclusion-Exclusion for finite sets follows immediately from Mayer-Vietoris.

Inclusion-Exclusion, and the passage from two sets to many

The basic principle of Inclusion-Exclusion says that if we have two sets, A and B, then the following relationship of cardinalities holds:
|A\cup B| = |A| + |B| – |A\cap B

This is a preview of Homological Inclusion-Exclusion and the Mayer-Vietoris sequence. Read the full post (1668 words, 131 images)

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Michi is a recent PhD working in homological algebra and applied algebraic topology. This blog is his outlet for texts with some manner of thought put into them. Over at his LiveJournal intimate details and streams of consciousness might be found.
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