I was reading Lages Lima's book about the Fundamental Group and to link the natural geometric sense of a homotopy we need to show that given two topological spaces $X$ and $Y$, it is possible to have a one-to-one correspondence between $C(X\times [0,1],Y)$ and $C(X,C([0,1],Y))$. The to-and-fro function back they are almost immediate, since we can $\varphi(H(x,t))=H_t(x)$. The problem is verifying the correct definition of $\varphi$ and $\varphi^{-1}$. I actually have several paths that I have tried without success:
- Using the compact-open topology
- Not using the compact-open topology, but assuming that $X$ is compact and $Y$ is a metric space.
En lages says that if $X$ is a locally compact Hausdorff space then the correspondence is well defined. Can this be stretched? or must we necessarily have at least that condition for $X$?
Can someone give me an idea please?