Computational Homology

Homology is a powerful tool used by mathematicians to study the properties of spaces and maps that are insensitive to small perturbations. This book uses a computer to develop a combinatorial computational approach to the subject. The core of the book deals with homology theory and its computation. Following this is a section containing extensions to further developments in algebraic topology, applications to computational dynamics, and applications to image processing. Included are exercises and software that can be used to compute homology groups and maps. The book will appeal to researchers and graduate students in mathematics, computer science, engineering, and nonlinear dynamics.

Cyclic homology was introduced in the early eighties independently by Connes and Tsygan. They came from different directions. Connes wanted to associate homological invariants to K-homology classes and to describe the index pair­ ing with K-theory in that way, while Tsygan was motivated by algebraic K-theory and Lie algebra cohomology. At the same time Karoubi had done work on characteristic classes that led him to study related structures, without however arriving at cyclic homology properly speaking. Many of the principal properties of cyclic homology were already developed in the fundamental article of Connes and in the long paper by Feigin-Tsygan.

This book brings together unpublished chapters on this technique. In this book chapters are intimately related to the theme of molecular modeling, carefully selected and edited for academic and scientific readers. It is an indispensable read for anyone interested in the areas of bioinformatics and computational biology.

Two top experts in topology, O.Ya. Viro and D.B. Fuchs, give an up-to-date account of research in central areas of topology and the theory of Lie groups. They cover homotopy, homology and cohomology as well as the theory of manifolds, Lie groups, Grassmanians and low-dimensional manifolds. Their book will be used by graduate students and researchers in mathematics and mathematical physics.

This second volume of Research in Computational Topology is a celebration and promotion of research by women in applied and computational topology, containing the proceedings of the second workshop for Women in Computational Topology (WinCompTop) as well as papers solicited from the broader WinCompTop community. The multidisciplinary and international WinCompTop workshop provided an exciting and unique opportunity for women in diverse locations and research specializations to interact extensively and collectively contribute to new and active research directions in the field. The prestigious senior researchers that signed on to head projects at the workshop are global leaders in the discipline, and two of them were authors on some of the first papers in the field.