This little book discusses a famous problem which helped to define the field now known as topology: what is the minimum number of colours required to print a map so that no two adjoining countries have the same colour, no matter how convoluted their boundaries? Many mathematicians have worked on the problem, but the proof eluded formulation until the 1950s, when it was finally cracked with a brute-force approach using a computer. The book begins by discussing the history of the problem, and then goes into the mathematics on such a level as to allow anyone with an elementary knowledge of...

This book describes the construction and the properties of CW-complexes. These spaces are important because firstly they are the correct framework for homotopy theory, and secondly most spaces that arise in pure mathematics are of this type. The authors discuss the foundations and also developments, for example, the theory of finite CW-complexes, CW-complexes in relation to the theory of fibrations, and Milnor's work on spaces of the type of CW-complexes. They establish very clearly the relationship between CW-complexes and the theory of simplicial complexes, which is developed in great...