Homology

This book is an introduction to modern methods of symplectic topology. It is devoted to explaining the solution of an important problem originating from classical mechanics: the 'Arnold conjecture', which asserts that the number of 1-periodic trajectories of a non-degenerate Hamiltonian system is bounded below by the dimension of the homology of the underlying manifold.

This book is an introduction to modern methods of symplectic topology. It is devoted to explaining the solution of an important problem originating from classical mechanics: the 'Arnold conjecture', which asserts that the number of 1-periodic trajectories of a non-degenerate Hamiltonian system is bounded below by the dimension of the homology of the underlying manifold.

This book is based on the lecture notes from a course we taught at Penn State University during the fall of 2002. The main goal of the course was to give a complete and detailed proof of the Morse Homology Theorem (Theo­ rem 7.4) at a level appropriate for second year graduate students. The course was designed for students who had a basic understanding of singular homol­ ogy, CW-complexes, applications of the existence and uniqueness theorem for O.D.E.s to vector fields on smooth Riemannian manifolds, and Sard's Theo­ rem. We would like to thank the following students for their participation in the course and their help proofreading early versions of this manuscript: James Barton, Shantanu Dave, Svetlana Krat, Viet-Trung Luu, and Chris Saunders. We would especially like to thank Chris Saunders for his dedication and en­ thusiasm concerning this project and the many helpful suggestions he made throughout the development of this text. We would also like to thank Bob Wells for sharing with us his extensive knowledge of CW-complexes, Morse theory, and singular homology. Chapters 3 and 6, in particular, benefited significantly from the many insightful conver­ sations we had with Bob Wells concerning a Morse function and its associated CW-complex.

This book brings together unpublished chapters on this technique.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.

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.

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.

This book is based on the lecture notes from a course we taught at Penn State University during the fall of 2002. The main goal of the course was to give a complete and detailed proof of the Morse Homology Theorem (Theo­ rem 7.4) at a level appropriate for second year graduate students. The course was designed for students who had a basic understanding of singular homol­ ogy, CW-complexes, applications of the existence and uniqueness theorem for O.D.E.s to vector fields on smooth Riemannian manifolds, and Sard's Theo­ rem. We would like to thank the following students for their participation in the course and their help proofreading early versions of this manuscript: James Barton, Shantanu Dave, Svetlana Krat, Viet-Trung Luu, and Chris Saunders. We would especially like to thank Chris Saunders for his dedication and en­ thusiasm concerning this project and the many helpful suggestions he made throughout the development of this text. We would also like to thank Bob Wells for sharing with us his extensive knowledge of CW-complexes, Morse theory, and singular homology. Chapters 3 and 6, in particular, benefited significantly from the many insightful conver­ sations we had with Bob Wells concerning a Morse function and its associated CW-complex.