Kuiper's Theorem - General Topology of The General Linear Group

General Topology of The General Linear Group

For finite dimensional H, this group would be a complex general linear group and not at all contractible. In fact it is homotopy equivalent to its maximal compact subgroup, the unitary group U of H. The proof that the complex general linear group and unitary group have the same homotopy type is by the Gram-Schmidt process, or through the matrix polar decomposition, and carries over to the infinite-dimensional case of separable Hilbert space, basically because the space of upper triangular matrices is contractible as can be seen quite explicitly. The underlying phenomenon is that passing to infinitely many dimensions causes much of the topological complexity of the unitary groups to vanish; but see the section on Bott's unitary group, where the passage to infinity is more constrained, and the resulting group has non-trivial homotopy groups.