Topology of Definable Hausdorff Limits

Let A ^n+r be a set definable in an o-minimal expansion S of the real field, let A ^r be its projection, and assume that the non-empty fibers A_a ⁿ are compact for all a A and uniformly bounded, i.e. all fibers are contained in a ball of fixed radius B(0,R). If L is the Hausdorff limit of a sequence of fibers A_ai, we give an upper-bound for the Betti numbers b_k(L) in terms of definable sets explicitly constructed from a fiber A_a. In particular, this allows us to establish effective complexity bounds in the semialgebraic case and in the Pfaffian case. In the Pfaffian setting, Gabrielov introduced the relative closure to construct the o-minimal structure S_Pfaff generated by Pfaffian functions in a way that is adapted to complexity problems. Our results can be used to estimate the Betti numbers of a relative closure (X,Y)₀ in the special case where Y=.