In contrast to the vast literature on Euclidean geometry as a whole, little has been published on the relatively recent developments in the field of combinatorial geometry. Boltyanskii and Gohberg's book investigates this area, which has undergone particularly rapid growth in the last thirty years. By restricting themselves to two dimensions, the authors make the book uniquely accessible to interested high school students while maintaining a high level of rigor. They discuss a variety of problems on figures of constant width, convex figures, coverings, and illumination. The book offers a...

Topology is a relatively young and very important branch of mathematics. It studies properties of objects that are preserved by deformations, twistings, and stretchings, but not tearing. This book deals with the topology of curves and surfaces as well as with the fundamental concepts of homotopy and homology, and does this in a lively and well-motivated way. There is hardly an area of mathematics that does not make use of topological results and concepts. The importance of topological methods for different areas of physics is also beyond doubt. They are used in field theory and general...