Contracting spaces of maps on the countable direct limit of a space

Abstract

We give conditions sufficient to imply the contractibility of the space of maps, with compact-open topology, on the countable direct limit of a space. Applying these conditions we obtain the following: Let F be the conjugate of a separable infinite-dimensional Banach space with bounded weak- ∗ ^\ast topology, or the countable direct limit of the real line. Then there is a contraction of the space of maps on F which simultaneously contracts the subspaces of open maps, embeddings, closed embeddings, and homeomorphisms. Corollaries of our work are that any homeomorphism on F, F as above, is invertibly isotopic to the identity, and the general linear group of the countable direct limit of lines is contractible.