Connected locally connected toposes are path-connected

Abstract

A conjecture of A. Joyal is proved, which states that, in contrast to topological spaces, toposes which are connected and locally connected are also path-connected. The reason for this phenomenon is the triviality of cardinality considerations in the topos-theoretic setting; any inhabited object pulls back to an enumerable object under some open surjective geometric morphism. This result points towards a homotopy theory for toposes.