Local contractibility of the group of homeomorphisms of a manifold

In this paper the group of homeomorphisms of an arbitrary topological manifold is considered, with either the compact-open, uniform (relative to a fixed metric), or majorant topology. In the latter topology, a basis of neighborhoods of the identity is given by the strictly positive functions on the manifold, a homeomorphism being in the neighborhood determined by such a function if it moves each point less than the value of this function at the point. The main result of the paper is the proof of the local contractibility of the group of homeomorphisms in the majorant topology. Examples are easily constructed to show that this assertion is false for the other two topologies for open manifolds. In the case of a compact manifold the three topologies coincide. In conclusion a number of corollaries are given; for example, if a homeomorphism of a manifold can be approximated by stable homeomorphisms then it is itself stable.
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