On Colimits in Various Categories of Manifolds

Homotopy theorists have traditionally studied topological spaces and used methods which rely heavily on computation, construction, and induction. Proofs often go by constructing some horrendously complicated object (usually via a tower of increasingly complicated objects) and then proving inductively that we can understand what’s going on at each step and that in the limit these steps do what is required. For this reason, a homotopy theorist need the freedom to make any construction he wishes, e.g. products, subobjects, quotients, gluing towers of spaces together, dividing out by group actions, moving to fixed points of group actions, etc.