J. Munkres Topology

Riemannian Topology and Geometric Structures on Manifolds results from a similarly entitled conference held at the University of New Mexico in Albuquerque. The various contributions to this volume discuss recent advances in the areas of positive sectional curvature, Kähler and Sasaki geometry, and their interrelation to mathematical physics, notably M and superstring theory. Focusing on these fundamental ideas, this collection presents articles with original results, and plausible problems of interest for future research.

The papers in this collection, all fully refereed, original papers, reflect many aspects of recent significant advances in homotopy theory and group cohomology.

Written by a computer scientist for computer scientists, this book teaches topology from a computational point of view, and shows how to solve real problems that have topological aspects involving computers. Such problems arise in many areas, such as computer graphics, robotics, structural biology, and chemistry.

The papers in this collection, all fully refereed, original papers, reflect many aspects of recent significant advances in homotopy theory and group cohomology.

This volume mainly focuses on various comprehensive topological theories, with the exception of a paper on combinatorial topology versus point-set topology by I.M. James and a paper on the history of the normal Moore space problem by P. Nyikos.

The first five chapters of this book form an introductory course in piece­ wise-linear topology in which no assumptions are made other than basic topological notions. This course would be suitable as a second course in topology with a geometric flavour, to follow a first course in point-set topology, andi)erhaps to be given as a final year undergraduate course. The whole book gives an account of handle theory in a piecewise­ linear setting and could be the basis of a first year postgraduate lecture or reading course. Some results from algebraic topology are needed for handle theory and these are collected in an appendix. In a second appen­ dix are listed the properties of Whitehead torsion which are used in the s-cobordism theorem. These appendices should enable a reader with only basic knowledge to complete the book. The book is also intended to form an introduction to modern geo­ metric topology as a research subject, a bibliography of research papers being included. We have omitted acknowledgements and references from the main text and have collected these in a set of "historical notes" to be found after the appendices.