History In the late 19th century Camille Jordan introduced the notion of homotopy and used the notion of a homotopy group, without using the language of group theory. A more rigorous approach was adopted by Henri Poincaré in his 1895 set of papers Analysis situs where the related concepts of homology and the fundamental group were also introduced. Higher homotopy groups were first defined by Eduard Čech in 1932. (His first paper was withdrawn on the advice of Pavel Sergeyevich Alexandrov and Heinz Hopf, on the grounds that the groups were commutative so could not be the right generalizations of the fundamental group.) Witold Hurewicz is also credited with the introduction of homotopy groups in his 1935 paper and also for the Hurewicz theorem which can be used to calculate some of the groups. An important method for calculating the various groups is the concept of stable algebraic topology, which finds properties that are independent of the dimensions. Typically these only hold for larger dimensions. The first such result was Hans Freudenthal's suspension theorem, published in 1937. Stable algebraic topology flourished between 1945 and 1966 with many important results. In 1953 George W. Whitehead showed that there is a metastable range for the homotopy groups of spheres. Jean-Pierre Serre used spectral sequences to show that most of these groups are finite, the exceptions being and . Others who worked in this area included José Adem, Hiroshi Toda, Frank Adams, J. Peter May, Mark Mahowald, Daniel Isaksen, Guozhen Wang, and Zhouli Xu. The stable homotopy groups are known for up to 90, and, as of 2023, unknown for larger . General theory As noted already, when is less than , , the trivial group. The reason is that a continuous mapping from an -sphere to an -sphere with can always be deformed so that it is not surjective. Consequently, its image is contained in with a point removed; this is a contractible space, and any mapping to such a space can be deformed into a one-point mapping. The case has also been noted already, and is an easy consequence of the Hurewicz theorem: this theorem links homotopy groups with homology groups, which are generally easier to calculate; in particular, it shows that for a simply-connected space X, the first nonzero homotopy group , with , is isomorphic to the first nonzero homology group . For the -sphere, this immediately implies that