Homotopy Characterization of ANR Function Spaces

Abstract

LetYbe an absolute neighbourhood retract (ANR) for the class of metric spaces and letXbe a topological space. LetYXdenote the space of continuous maps fromXtoYequipped with the compact open topology. We show that ifXis a compactly generated Tychonoff space andYis not discrete, thenYXis an ANR for metric spaces if and only ifXis hemicompact andYXhas the homotopy type of a CW complex.