Homotopy is an important feature of associative and Jordan algebraic
structures: such structures always come in families whose members need not be
isomorphic among other, but still share many important properties. One may
regard homotopy as a special kind of deformation of a given algebraic
structure. In this work, we investigate the global counterpart of this
phenomenon on the geometric level of the associated symmetric spaces -- on this
level, homotopy gives rise to conformal deformations of symmetric spaces. These
results are valid in arbitrary dimension and over general base fields and
-rings.Comment: 28 pages, 2nd corrected versio
