Topology I: General Survey

ISBN-13: 9783642057359 / Angielski / Miękka / 2010 / 322 str.

S.P. Novikov;S.P. Novikov;B. Botvinnik

Opis

Introduction In the present essay, we attempt to convey some idea of the skeleton of topology, and of various topological concepts. It must be said at once that, apart from the necessary minimum, the subject-matter of this survey does not indude that subdiscipline known as "general topology" - the theory of general spaces and maps considered in the context of set theory and general category theory. (Doubtless this subject will be surveyed in detail by others. ) With this qualification, it may be daimed that the "topology" dealt with in the present survey is that mathematieal subject whieh in the late 19th century was called Analysis Situs, and at various later periods separated out into various subdisciplines: "Combinatorial topology," "Algebraic topology," "Differential (or smooth) topology," "Homotopy theory," "Geometrie topology." With the growth, over a long period of time, in applications of topology to other areas of mathematics, the following further subdisciplines crystallized out: the global calculus of variations, global geometry, the topology of Lie groups and homogeneous spaces, the topology of complex manifolds and alge braic varieties, the qualitative (topologieal) theory of dynamical systems and foliations, the topology of elliptic and hyperbolic partial differential equations. Finally, in the 1970s and 80s, a whole complex of applications of topologie al methods was made to problems of modern physiesj in fact in several instances it would have been impossible to understand the essence of the real physical phenomena in question without the aid of concepts from topology."

Blurb

This book constitutes nothing less than an up-to-date survey of the whole field of topology (with the exception of "general (set-theoretic) topology"), or, in the words of Novikov himself, of what was termed at the end of the 19th century "Analysis Situs", and subsequently diversified into the various subfields of combinatorial, algebraic, differential, homotopic, and geometric topology. The book gives an overview of these subfields, beginning with the elements and proceeding right up to the present frontiers of research. Thus one finds here the whole range of topological concepts from fibre spaces (Chap.2), CW-complexes, homology and homotopy, through bordism theory and K-theory to the Adams-Novikov spectral sequence (Chap.3), and in Chapter 4 an exhaustive (but necessarily concentrated) survey of the theory of manifolds. An appendix sketching the recent impressive developments in the theory of knots and links and low-dimensional topology generally, brings the survey right up to the present. This work represents the flagship, as it were, in whose wake follow more detailed surveys of the various subfields, by various authors.