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 Summary
We present several original results in homotopy type theory which are related to
the truncation level of types, a concept due to Voevodsky. To begin, we give a
few simple criteria for determining whether a type is 0-truncated (a set), inspired
by a well-known theorem by Hedberg, and these criteria are then generalised to
arbitrary n. This naturally leads to a discussion of functions that are weakly con-
stant, i.e. map any two inputs to equal outputs. A weakly constant function does
in general not factor through the propositional truncation of its domain. How-
ever, the factorisation is (among other cases) always possible for weakly constant
endofunctions, which we use to define a propositional notion of existence. Further,
we present a couple of constructions which are only possible with the judgmental
computation rule for the truncation, for example an invertibility puzzle that seem-
ingly inverts the canonical map from N to ∥N∥.
One of the two main results is the construction of strict n-types in Martin-Löf
type theory with a hierarchy of univalent universes (and without higher induct-
ive types), and a proof that the universe Un is not n-truncated. The other main
result of this thesis is a generalised universal property of the propositional trun-
cation, using a construction of coherently constant functions. We show that the
type of such coherently constant functions from A to B is equivalent to the type
∥A∥ → B. In the general case the definition requires an infinite tower of condi-
tions, which exists if the type theory has Reedy limits of diagrams over ω op . If
B is an n-type for some given finite n, (non-trivial) Reedy limits are unnecessary,
allowing us to construct functions ∥A∥ → B in homotopy type theory without
further assumptions. To obtain these results, we develop some theory on equality
diagrams, especially equality semi-simplicial types. In particular, we show that
the semi-simplicial equality type over any type satisfies the Kan condition, which
can be seen as the simplicial version of the result by Lumsdaine, and by van den
Berg and Garner, that types are weak ω-groupoids.
Finally, we present some results related to formalisations of infinite structures.
For example, we show how the category ∆+ of finite non-empty sets and strictly
increasing functions can be implemented so that the categorical rules hold strictly.
In the presence of very dependent types, we speculate that this makes the “Reedy
approach” for the famous open problem of defining semi-simplicial types work.

i
 Acknowledgements
First of all, I want to express my deep and honest gratitude to Thorsten Altenkirch.
It has been a privilege to be his PhD student. During the last years, he has always
given me freedom to pursue my own ideas, and offered me guidance whenever I
could benefit from it. When I encountered a problem, he always readily provided
suggestions and support (even at times when other things kept him busy as well).
He made it possible that I could visit the univalent foundations special year in
Princeton and many other interesting events. He is an excellent teacher of all sorts
of academic topics and an inspiring discussion partner for research ideas. Maybe
most importantly, he has always been a thoughtful and caring mentor for me.
Special thanks goes to Christian Sattler. In the last decade, I have learned far
more mathematics from him than from any of my professors. He is an exceptional
academic colleague and an invaluable friend.
I am thankful for many interesting discussions, especially with Martín Escardó
and Paolo Capriotti. Without all the ideas Martín and I have shared, the contents
and probably even the title of my thesis would be different today, which I believe
says it all. With Paolo, I could always discuss all sorts of questions, and I have
learned a lot from him and from all our reading groups. I also thank everyone else
for their interest and contributions to our regular meetings, in particular Venanzio
Capretta and, of course, Christian and Thorsten, but also Gabe Dijkstra, Ambrus
Kaposi, Nuo Li and, in the end, Manuel Bärenz.
My two thesis examiners, Julie Greensmith (internal examiner) and Steve
Awodey (external examiner) have both spent a lot of time with my thesis. I
truly appreciate their work, which has helped me in several ways. Their advice
has enabled me to improve the general style of the thesis and the readability of
multiple text passages, and, of course, to fix various smaller typographical mis-
takes. Steve’s comments on my research itself have been valuable and have led to
not only interesting ideas for future research, but also to a couple of remarks that
I have added in the current (final) version of the thesis.
I was very lucky that I happened to be a student at the same time as Ambrus
and Nuo. We have shared many interests, academic ones and non-academic ones.
In the early days of my PhD studies, I have received support from Andreas Abel
and Neil Sculthorpe. Already a decade before that, my interest for mathematics
was stimulated by my high school teacher Markus Jakob.
There are many more people who would deserve to be mentioned. I thank
the participants (especially the organisers, Steve Awodey, Thierry Coquand, and
Vladimir Voevodsky) of the special year in Princeton and all other meetings for
a lot of stimulating input, in particular Thierry Coquand and Michael Shulman.
The first has given me advice on several occurrences and I had the pleasure of
working with him, as well as with Martín and Thorsten, on a joint project. The
latter has inspired me a lot through his numerous amazing blog posts. I am also
grateful for the interesting remarks of Vladimir Voevodsky on one of my main

iii
results, and I thank Andrea Vezzosi for his contributions to one of the projects I
have worked on. Many people have given me feedback on my work, and I would
like to thank everyone who did, as this has been very valuable for me. Some of the
comments I could understand immediately, and others required (or still require)
me to spend some time before I could fully benefit from them. I explicitly want
to include the anonymous reviewers of the work that I have published during the
time of my PhD studies, who have all given very helpful feedback. In general, the
community of this research area is welcoming and friendly, making it easy for a
student to become a part of it.
I am also grateful to Venanzio Capretta for spending time with my work and
for making valuable suggestions during my annual reviews. Apart from Martín
and Thorsten, I especially thank Graham Hutton for his general support in many
situations. All the members of the functional programming lab in Nottingham
have made the last years truly enjoyable.
I want to restrict these acknowledgements to the mostly academic component.
I am not someone who likes to make details of his private life public. Nevertheless,
the support that many people (especially Irmgard and Norbert Kraus, and Jocelyn
Chen) have given me outside of the academic environment has been extremely
important, and I know they are aware of my thankfulness.

iv
Contents

Summary i

Acknowledgements iii

Contents v

1 Introduction 1
1.1 Historical Outline . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2
1.2 A brief introduction to truncation levels and operations . . . . . . 6
1.3 Overview over Our Results . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 8
1.4 Computer-Verified Formalisations . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 13
1.5 Declaration of Authorship and Previous Publications . . . . . . . . 15

2 Overview over Homotopy Type Theory and Preliminaries 17

2.1 Martin-Löf Type Theory . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 18
2.2 Constructions with Propositional Equality . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 23
2.3 Homotopy Type Theory . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 34
2.4 A Word on Ambiguity Avoidance and Readability . . . . . . . . . . 40

3 Truncation Level Criteria 43

3.1 Hedberg’s Theorem Revisited . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 43
3.2 Generalisations to Higher Levels . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 49

4 Anonymous Existence 51
4.1 Collapsible Types have Split Support . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 51
4.2 Populatedness . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 56
4.3 Comparison of Notions of Existence . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 58

5 Weakly Constant Functions 69

5.1 The Limitations of Weak Constancy . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 69
5.2 Factorisation for Special Cases . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 72

6 On the Computation Rule of the Propositional Truncation 79

6.1 The Interval . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 80
6.2 Function Extensionality . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 83

v
 6.3 Judgmental Factorisation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 83
6.4 An Invertibility Puzzle . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 85

7 Higher Homotopies in a Hierarchy of Univalent Universes 89

7.1 Background of the Problem . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 89
7.2 The First Cases . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 93
7.3 Pointed Types . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 96
7.4 Homotopically Complicated Types . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 98
7.5 A Solution with the “Wrapping” Approach . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 101
7.6 Connectedness . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 104
7.7 Combining the Results . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 112

8 The General Universal Properties of Truncations 115

8.1 A First Few Special Cases . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 119
8.2 Fibration Categories, Inverse Diagrams, and Reedy Limits . . . . . 124
8.3 Subdiagrams . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 128
8.4 Equality Diagrams . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 130
8.5 The Equality Semisimplicial Type . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 131
8.6 Fibrant Diagrams of Natural Transformations . . . . . . . . . . . . 135
8.7 Extending Semi-Simplicial Types . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 137
8.8 The Main Theorem . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 141
8.9 Finite Cases . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 147
8.10 Elimination Principles for Higher Truncations . . . . . . . . . . . . 150
8.11 The Big Picture: Solved and Unsolved Cases . . . . . . . . . . . . . 161

9 Future Directions and Concluding Remarks 167

9.1 The Problem of Formalising Infinite Structures . . . . . . . . . . . . 167
9.2 Semi-Simplicial Types . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 168
9.3 Yoneda Groupoids . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 178
9.4 Set-Based Groupoids . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 183
9.5 Further Notes on Related Work and Conclusions . . . . . . . . . . . 186

Bibliography 193

○
A Electronic Appendix

vi
Chapter 1

Introduction

Homotopy type theory is a new branch of mathematics. It forms a bridge between

seemingly very distant topics: Only ten years ago, very few, if any, type theorists
would have expected to get involved in algebraic topology or the theory of weak
ω-categories, and neither would researchers who feel at home when it comes to
the fundamental groups of spaces have believed that a significant amount of their
discoveries can be formalised and computer-verified in an elegant way, using a
foundation of mathematics that is based on something known as Martin-Löf type
theory.
This thesis presents several results on truncation levels, informally, the higher
homotopical structure of types. The important observation that this concept can
be formulated internally in type theory is due to Voevodsky [Voe10a]. The thesis
is subdivided into nine chapters. At the beginning of each chapter, we give a
very concise overview over its contents. In this introductory Chapter 1, we first
present a short historical outline (Section 1.1), and the ideas of truncation levels is
explained in Section 1.2. We then give a detailed overview over the contents of this
thesis and the results with their developments. In particular, a list stating which
results I consider my main contributions to the field of homotopy type theory
can be found at the end of Section 1.3. An important aspect of the considered
field of research are computer-verified formalisations. Because of this, the current
thesis has an electronic appendix with such formalisations, and some details are
described in Section 1.4. Finally, in Section 1.5, we provide additional information
on journal and conference publications that have been based on the contents of
this thesis. Much of the work has been done in collaboration, and we strive to
give a detailed statement on authorships.
There are many excellent introductions to homotopy type theory, both in terms
of its development and its concepts and results. Although some information is
provided in this thesis, in particular in Chapter 2, a beginner is advised to read
through an introduction that covers the basic concepts in higher detail. The ca-
nonical reference is certainly the book Homotopy Type Theory: Univalent Founda-
tions of Mathematics [Uni13], written by the participants of the 2012/13 Univalent

1
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1. Introduction

Foundations Program at the Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton. Others in-
clude the overview by Awodey [Awo12], the notice of Awodey, Pelayo, and Warren
for the AMS [APW13], and the introduction by Pelayo and Warren [PW12].

1.1 Historical Outline

Martin-Löf type theory (MLTT), more precisely intensional Martin-Löf type the-
ory, and sometimes also referred to as Intuitionistic or Constructive type theory,
was introduced and pushed forward by Martin-Löf [ML98; ML75; ML82; ML84].
It constitutes a branch of mathematical logic with many applications in computer
science, especially in the theory of programming languages. At the same time,
it is powerful enough to serve as a framework for the formalisation of huge parts
of mathematics. These two, namely “programming” and “proving” (loosly speak-
ing), can indeed be viewed as the main applications of MLTT. Obviously, this
connection is based on the Curry-Howard Correspondence [How80] and one could
argue that the two concepts are the same thing; however, in praxis, someone using
MLTT for programming often has slightly different requirements than someone
who is trying to prove a theorem.
Among mathematicians, fairly well known is the proof assistant Coq which is
based on a variant of MLTT, the Calculus of Inductive Constructions [CH88]. Coq
has acquired much of its publicity when it was utilised by Gonthier and Werner
to formalise a proof of the famous Four Colour Theorem [Gon08] which says that
at most four colours are necessary to colour a map such that adjacent countries
do not have the same colour. For more recent work in Coq, we want to mention
the Feit-Thompson Odd Order Theorem [Gon+13] and the ForMath project.
Another implementation of MLTT is Agda [Nor07]. Of course, it can be used
as a proof assistant, and indeed, we have used it to formalise many of our res-
ults presented in this thesis. Yet, it is often viewed as a programming language,
even though there is in theory (close to) no difference between a dependently
typed programming language and a proof assistant. Programming in a depend-
ently typed language bears huge advantages. The rich type system can be utilised
to provide an immediate precise formal specification or correctness proof of a
program. Moreover, even though beginners of Agda who come from another func-
tional programming language such as Haskell can find the powerful type system
a burden, this opinion changes as they get accustomed to it. If a program does
not type check in Agda, something is wrong, and a second thought would be re-
quired in Haskell as well, the only difference being that Haskell would not tell the
programmer.
A core aspect of MLTT is computation: terms are identified with their normal
forms. For concrete implementations, such as Agda and Coq, this means that
we have an automatic simplification of expressions. For a programmer, this is an
obvious necessity. On the other hand, in a proof on paper, such a simplification
would have to be done manually by the mathematician, and we believe that the

2
 1.1. Historical Outline

computational behaviour of type theory can be seen as one of its main features
that make it valuable for the mathematical community.
One more particularly interesting (and crucial) concept in MLTT is equality.
Type theory knows two different forms of equality: first, there is the so-called
definitional or judgmental equality, based on what we have just described: terms
are identified if they behave identically from the computational point of view,
meaning that they have the same normal form (that is, they are identical after be-
ing evaluated). In a more abstract sense, judgmental equality is a meta-theoretic
concept of MLTT that is used for type checking. In intensional type theory, judg-
mental equality, and thus type checking, is decidable, a demand that corresponds
to the very basic usage of proof assistants: if we have a potential proof p for a “pro-
position” P , the system should be able to check automatically whether p is indeed
a correct proof of P . Judgmental equality in concrete implementations typically
consists of β-equality and some forms of η-equality. If we want to express that a
and b are judgmentally equal, we write a ≡ b. If we further want to express that we
define a to be b, causing them trivially to be judgmentally equal, we write a ∶≡ b.
As we want judgmental equality to be decidable, it is clear that this is a very
strict notion of equality. Often, two mathematical objects are equal, but proving
so can be arbitrarily hard. The corresponding terms in type theory will generally
not be judgmentally equal, but only propositionally equal: for any two terms a
and b of the same type A, there is the type IdA (a, b) of proofs that a and b are
propositionally equal (as it is standard nowadays, we will later just write a =A b
or even a = b). Propositional equality is thus an internal concept, making the
formulation of mathematical theorems involving equality possible.
A caveat it required here. There is an extensional form of type theory with
the characteristic feature that it does not distinguish between judgmental and
propositional equality1 which makes type checking undecidable. Compared to
intensional type theory, the extensional variant has not received as much attention
in the literature due to its obvious weakness. In particular, it is of no interest for
us and when we talk about MLTT, we always implicitly mean intensional MLTT.
For some time, it was unknown whether uniqueness of identity proofs (UIP)
is derivable, i. e. whether, given p and q of type IdA (a, b), one can construct an
inhabitant of the type IdIdA (a,b) (p, q). This question was answered negatively by
Hofmann and Streicher, who observed that type theory can be interpreted in the
category of groupoids [HS96]. They also speculated that there might be models
using higher groupoids, and even ω-groupoids, but were lacking an appropriate
framework for the construction of such an interpretation.
UIP was often considered desirable: it was believed that a proof that a equals b
should be the mere information thereof, without containing additional data. The
homotopical view does not only show why UIP can not be derived nevertheless but
also helps to explain what its absence means. A type can be seen as a topological
1
Altenkirch argues that the common name “extensional type theory” is a misnomer for type
theory with this so-called reflection rule, as “extensional” should better refer to equality that
identifies expressions that behave equally.

3
1. Introduction

space, and an equality proof can be understood as a path in this space; but paths
are, in general, not unique. However, there might be a path between paths,
traditionally called a homotopy, and higher homotopies between homotopies, and
so on, giving a space the structure of a weak ω-groupoid. As Lumsdaine [Lum09]
and, independently, van den Berg and Garner [BG11] explained, types do indeed
carry the structure of a weak ω-groupoid.
In his PhD thesis, Warren [War08] generalised the Hofmann-Streicher groupoid
model (see also his article [War11]). Instead of ordinary groupoids, he uses strict
ω-groupoids to model MLTT. He thereby proves that, for any n, the principle
UIPn can not be derived, where UIPn is (the judgmental version of) the statement
that, for any type A, iterating the process of taking two points and considering
their path space n − 1 times always leads to a type with unique identity proofs.
In particular, he shows that having UIPm for all types is strictly stronger than
UIPn if m < n. Voevodsky’s model in simplicial sets [Voe10a] can be understood
as a further improvement of Warren’s construction. Instead of strict ω-groupoids,
Voevodsky uses Kan simplicial sets, also known as weak ω-groupoids.
Let us discuss how a new variant of MLTT, because this is exactly what ho-
motopy type theory is, could have become so popular. While the mathematical
community seems to appreciate the existence of proof assistants in principle, their
practical usage is still mostly restricted to those subjects that are close to logic,
or, looking at the Four Colour Theorem, those cases that require a case analysis so
vast that it is unfeasible to do it by hand. Two reasons for that restriction are cer-
tainly the vast overhead that formalisations often require, and certain behaviours
of type theory that are not understood sufficiently.
However, some years ago, progress in the semantics of MLTT lead to a de-
velopment that has improved the situation with respect to both of these issues.
Traditionally, a number of different views on types existed, including types as sets
(Russel [Rus03]) or propositions (Curry and Howard [How80]); see [PW12] for a
discussion. In addition to these, Voevodsky [Voe06; Voe10a] and, independently,
Awodey and Warren [AW09] noticed that types may also be regarded as, roughly
speaking, topological spaces, with the space of paths between two points corres-
ponding to the identity type of two terms. This new interpretation, the details
of which needed some time to be worked out, has helped to explain a lot of the
behaviour of MLTT regarding equality.
As a side node, we want to remark that another connection between type
theory and topology was found much earlier. Very briefly, a set of elements of
a type (in whichever sense the notion might be appropriate in a specific setting)
can be seen as open if it is semi-decidable whether a given element is a member of
the set. In the same vein, if equality (again, in whichever sense it is appropriate)
is decidable, then every element forms an open (and closed) set, and the type
can be called discrete, see Proposition 3.1.1. A canonical reference is Vicker’s
textbook [Vic96] and various publications, e.g. [Vic99; Vic01; Vic05]. An early
and seminal contribution to the development was made by Scott (Continuous
Lattices, [Sco72]). Regarding more recent work which considers topology and type

4
 1.1. Historical Outline

theory explicitly, there is various work by Escardó and Xu [XE13; Esc15a], Escardó
and Olivia, e.g. [EO10], and Escardó, e.g. [Esc15a; Esc15b].
The ingenious idea that equality proofs can be seen as paths, however, has
only come up around 2005 or 2006. In Voevodsky’s simplicial set model (present-
ation by Streicher [Str11], and Kapulkin, Lumsdaine and Voevodsky [KLV12a],
extending [KLV12b]) another interesting property is fulfilled: equivalences corres-
pond to equalities of types. Consequently, it is consistent to assume Voevodsky’s
univalence axiom, which implies that isomorphic structures are actually equal and
can directly be substituted for each other. Models that justify the univalence
axiom have been a topic of active research. The Hofmann-Streicher groupoid
model [HS96] can be seen as the first model of MLTT that had one univalent uni-
verse, although the terminology was not used at that time. Inspired by the ideas
of Awodey, Voevodsky, and Warren, several new models of MLTT with identity
types were discovered, and the construction of such models became a topic of very
active research. Apart from those already discussed, we want to mention Arndt
and Kapulkin’s work on Homotopy-theoretic models of type theory [AK11], Garner
and van den Berg’s Topological and simplicial models of identity types [BG12], and
Awodey’s Natural models of homotopy type theory [Awo14].
This seems to be a key concept if we want type theory to be usable by work-
ing mathematicians as a tool for formal verification, or even for actually finding
proofs, as mathematicians tend to identify isomorphic structures in informal proofs
all the time. Hoping that type theory would finally be more accessible for math-
ematicians outside of the logic spectrum as he used to be himself, Voevodsky
continued working on his univalent foundations program.
From the programmer’s point of view, univalence ensures a form of abstrac-
tion that has been absent so far. Consider a type, say, the natural number N,
is implemented in two different ways. One could be the standard way, using the
constructors zero and succ, while another implementation could use a dyadic (or
binary) representation of N. These definitions are equivalent (if performed prop-
erly) and every operation that works for one of them will also work for the other;
however, traditionally, it has been necessary to reimplement all required func-
tions. The univalence axiom makes the equality between those implementations
available internally and all algorithms for one representation can directly be used
for the other one as well. It probably should not go unmentioned that there are
still problems to be solved here, in particular Voevodsky’s canonicity conjecture,
see [Voe10a], but the recent development of a constructive model in cubical sets
by Bezem, Coquand, and Huber [BCH14] (see also the addition [Coq13] and vari-
ation [Coq14]) makes the community feel confident that this problem will be solved
soon.
Soon after Awodey, Warren and Voevodsky made their ideas public, many
researchers from fields that were considered very different from type theory, such
as higher dimensional category theory and abstract topology, became fascinated
by the surprising connection that allowed to transfer intuition, or even results,
from one field to another. Traditional type theorists got excited because of the

5
1. Introduction

striking consequences of the univalence axiom, some of which had been considered
feasible (but hard to realise) before. These direct consequences of univalence
include function extensionality (considered, e. g., in [Alt99]) and (as described
above) an extensional universe [HS96]. The homotopical view later induced the
idea of higher inductive types (HITs), yielding very well-behaved quotient types (as
previously considered in [Men90; Hof95; AAL11]) as a special case. In particular,
the wish for properties that previously led to the development of observational
type theory [AM06; AMS07] are naturally satisfied, or conjectured to be satisfied,
in type theory with the univalence axiom. Due to the homotopical nature of the
type theory of interest, the broader topic became known as homotopy type theory
(HoTT). The first public mentioning of this name was possibly Awodey’s talk title
at PSSL862 in 2007. The names homotopy type theory and univalent foundations
have often been used synonymously. However at present, it appears that univalent
foundations refers mainly to Voevodsky’s research program of developing a system
to formalise mathematics in.
During the following years, various meetings took place, including a workshop
in Oberwolfach [Awo+11]. The steady growth of interest culminated in the year-
long special program on univalent foundations at the Institute for Advanced Study
in Princeton 2012/13, co-organized by Awodey, Coquand and Voevodsky, with
around 60 participants, long- and short-term visitors, with myself being one of
them. This was also where Homotopy Type Theory: Univalent Foundations of
Mathematics [Uni13] was collaboratively written, in the community often referred
to as “the HoTT book” or even as “the book”, which will serve as our main reference
for the basic properties of HoTT that we present in Chapter 2.
Especially during the program in Princeton, but also before and after, a lot
of progress was made. In particular, the formalisation of classical homotopy-
theoretical theorems was pushed forward. The formalised part of homotopy theory
includes the calculation of some homotopy groups of spheres, the van Kampen
theorem, the Freudenthal suspension theorem, a restricted form of Whitehead’s
theorem, the Blakers-Massey theorem, and others, mostly reported in [Uni13].

1.2 A brief introduction to truncation levels and

operations
One important aspect that plays a role for nearly everything done in HoTT are
the truncation levels of types. These are, in effect, an internalised version of the
property UIPn that a single specific type can satisfy. We say that a type X is (−2)-
truncated, or contractible, if we know a point x0 ∶ X, its centre, and we know that
every other point is equal to this point. Of course, we here refer to propositional
equality.
2
The 86th edition of the Peripatetic Seminar on Sheaves and Logic, Institut Élie Cartan,
Nancy

6
 1.2. A brief introduction to truncation levels and operations

A type is (−1)-truncated, or propositional, if for any two of its inhabitants the

path space is contractible. An equivalent way to express this is to say that any
two inhabitants are equal, which often is expressed by saying that it has at most
one inhabitant. In general, a type is (n + 1)-truncated if all its path spaces are
n-truncated, for n ≥ −2. It is easy to prove that a type satisfies UIP if and only if
it is 0-truncated, and such types are called sets. In general, an n-truncated type
is also called an n-type.
The notion of n-types, or n-truncatedness, comes from topology and related
areas. A primary example are topological spaces: a space is called a homotopy
n-type if all homotopy groups above degree n are trivial. Similarly, an ω-groupoid
can be called n-truncated if it is an n-groupoid. It was Voevodsky who realised that
this concept can be expressed in type theory [Voe10a]. Voevodsky’s terminology
differs slightly from ours, by speaking of h-levels (homotopy levels) and starting
to count at 0. In contrast, we use the terminology that is introduced in our main
reference [Uni13], that is, truncation levels which start at −2, which matches the
traditional numbering of topology. Thus, contractible types can be said to be
of truncation level −2 or of h-level 0, and in general, the statement that a type
is an n-type (or n-truncated) is identical to the statement that it is of (or has)
h-level (n + 2); the only difference is terminological. Several fundamental results
on h-levels are also due to Voevodsky [Voe10a; Voe10b; Voe13b]. These include
the fact that h-levels can be used to characterise functions, in particular (“weak”)
equivalences. In addition, he has proved that his univalence axiom implies weak
function extensionality (dependent function spaces preserve h-levels), and that
weak function extensionality implies “naive” function extensionality (which has
always been subject to discussions in intensional type theory). Voevodsky also
shows that “naive” function extensionality implies strong function extensionality,
stating that the canonical map (which, for any functions f and g, shows that f = g
implies f (x) = g(x) for all x) is an equivalence.
The truncation level of a type tells us something about its higher homotopical
structure. An n-type does not have any interesting structure above level n. It
turns out that, in HoTT, we can directly talk about the k-th loop space of a type,
and thereby indirectly about its k-th homotopy group. If k > n, the k-th loop space
and homotopy group of an n-type are trivial.
An interesting detail is hidden in the previous paragraph: we said that an
n-type does not have any interesting structure above level n. Indeed, the reason
is that for any number m > n, any n-type is also an m-type. From a topologist’s
point of view, this might be surprising at first sight. For example, let us pick m = 0
and n = −1. As we just said, a type is (−1)-connected if any two of its inhabitants
are equal. Topologically, this looks as if it was path-connected. However, a path-
connected space does not necessarily have the additional property of being simply
connected, which does not seem to match our claim that a (−1)-truncated type
is also 0-truncated. The solution to this lies in the observation that everything
we express type-theoretically is automatically stated in a continuous way. And
indeed, given a space, if we know that any two of its points are connected by a path,

7
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