Topology Waldman

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Since the early part of the 20th century, topology has gradually spread to many other branches of mathematics, and this book demonstrates how the subject continues to play a central role in the field. Written by a world-renowned mathematician, this classic text traces the history of algebraic topology beginning with its creation in the early 1900s and describes in detail the important theories that were discovered before 1960. Through the work of Poincaré, de Rham, Cartan, Hureqicz, and many others, this historical book also focuses on the emergence of new ideas and methods that have led 21st-century mathematicians towards new research directions.

Topology is one of the fundamental tools in relating entities. Topology naturally finds application in all fields of engineering, physical sciences, life sciences, social sciences, medicine, business and even the arts. The motivating insight behind topology is that some geometric problems depend not on the exact shape of the objects involved, but rather on the way they are put together. Circa 1750, Euler stated the polyhedron formula, V − E + F = 2 (where V, E, and F respectively indicate the number of vertices, edges, and faces of the polyhedron), which may be regarded as the first theorem, signaling the birth of topology. Subjects included in topology are algebraic topology and graph theory. A related branch to graph theory is molecular topology (with concerns of either chemical or biological structure).

This book contains the edited version of lectures and contributed papers presented at the NA TO ADV ANCED RESEARCH WORKSHOP ON TOPOLOGY OPTIMIZATION OF STRUCTURES, held at Hotel do Mar, Sesimbra, Portugal, 20 June to 26 June, 1992, and organised by the Mathematical Institutc, The Technical University of Denmark and bv CEMUL-Center of Mechanics and Materials of the Techmcal University of Lisbon, Fifty participants from' fourteen countries attended the workshop,

In recent years, many students have been introduced to topology in high school mathematics. Having met the Mobius band, the seven bridges of Konigsberg, Euler's polyhedron formula, and knots, the student is led to expect that these picturesque ideas will come to full flower in university topology courses. What a disappointment "undergraduate topology" proves to be! In most institutions it is either a service course for analysts, on abstract spaces, or else an introduction to homological algebra in which the only geometric activity is the completion of commutative diagrams. Pictures are kept to a minimum, and at the end the student still does not understand the simplest topological facts, such as the reason why knots exist. In my opinion, a well-balanced introduction to topology should stress its intuitive geometric aspect, while admitting the legitimate interest that analysts and algebraists have in the subject. At any rate, this is the aim of the present book. In support of this view, I have followed the historical develop­ ment where practicable, since it clearly shows the influence of geometric thought at all stages. This is not to claim that topology received its main impetus from geometric recrea. ions like the seven bridges; rather, it resulted from the visualization of problems from other parts of mathematics­ complex analysis (Riemann), mechanics (poincare), and group theory (Oehn). It is these connections to other parts of mathematics which make topology an important as well as a beautiful subject.

This book presents some of the basic topological ideas used in studying differentiable manifolds and maps. Mathematical prerequisites have been kept to a minimum; the standard course in analysis and general topology is adequate preparation. An appendix briefly summarizes some of the back­ ground material. In order to emphasize the geometrical and intuitive aspects of differen­ tial topology, I have avoided the use of algebraic topology, except in a few isolated places that can easily be skipped. For the same reason I make no use of differential forms or tensors. In my view, advanced algebraic techniques like homology theory are better understood after one has seen several examples of how the raw material of geometry and analysis is distilled down to numerical invariants, such as those developed in this book: the degree of a map, the Euler number of a vector bundle, the genus of a surface, the cobordism class of a manifold, and so forth. With these as motivating examples, the use of homology and homotopy theory in topology should seem quite natural. There are hundreds of exercises, ranging in difficulty from the routine to the unsolved. While these provide examples and further developments of the theory, they are only rarely relied on in the proofs of theorems.