Foundational Essays on Topological Manifolds, Smoothings, and Triangulations. (AM-88), Volume 88

Foundational Essays on Topological Manifolds, Smoothings, and Triangulations. (AM-88), Volume 88
Author: Robion C. Kirby
Publisher: Princeton University Press
Total Pages: 368
Release: 2016-03-02
Genre: Mathematics
ISBN: 1400881501

Since Poincaré's time, topologists have been most concerned with three species of manifold. The most primitive of these--the TOP manifolds--remained rather mysterious until 1968, when Kirby discovered his now famous torus unfurling device. A period of rapid progress with TOP manifolds ensued, including, in 1969, Siebenmann's refutation of the Hauptvermutung and the Triangulation Conjecture. Here is the first connected account of Kirby's and Siebenmann's basic research in this area. The five sections of this book are introduced by three articles by the authors that initially appeared between 1968 and 1970. Appendices provide a full discussion of the classification of homotopy tori, including Casson's unpublished work and a consideration of periodicity in topological surgery.

Foundational Essays on Topological Manifolds, Smoothings, and Triangulations

Foundational Essays on Topological Manifolds, Smoothings, and Triangulations
Author: Robion C. Kirby
Publisher: Annals of Mathematics Studies
Total Pages: 355
Release: 1977
Genre: Mathematics
ISBN: 9780691081908

Since Poincaré's time, topologists have been most concerned with three species of manifold. The most primitive of these--the TOP manifolds--remained rather mysterious until 1968, when Kirby discovered his now famous torus unfurling device. A period of rapid progress with TOP manifolds ensued, including, in 1969, Siebenmann's refutation of the Hauptvermutung and the Triangulation Conjecture. Here is the first connected account of Kirby's and Siebenmann's basic research in this area. The five sections of this book are introduced by three articles by the authors that initially appeared between 1968 and 1970. Appendices provide a full discussion of the classification of homotopy tori, including Casson's unpublished work and a consideration of periodicity in topological surgery.

Introduction to Piecewise-Linear Topology

Introduction to Piecewise-Linear Topology
Author: Colin P. Rourke
Publisher: Springer Science & Business Media
Total Pages: 133
Release: 2012-12-06
Genre: Mathematics
ISBN: 3642817351

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.

Topology I

Topology I
Author: S.P. Novikov
Publisher: Springer Science & Business Media
Total Pages: 326
Release: 2013-06-29
Genre: Mathematics
ISBN: 3662105799

This up-to-date survey of the whole field of topology is the flagship of the topology subseries of the Encyclopaedia. The book gives an overview of various subfields, beginning with the elements and proceeding right up to the present frontiers of research.

The Collected Papers of Stephen Smale

The Collected Papers of Stephen Smale
Author: Stephen Smale
Publisher: World Scientific
Total Pages: 532
Release: 2000
Genre: Mathematics
ISBN: 9789810249915

This invaluable book contains the collected papers of Stephen Smale. These are divided into eight groups: topology; calculus of variations; dynamics; mechanics; economics; biology, electric circuits and mathematical programming; theory of computation; miscellaneous. In addition, each group contains one or two articles by world leaders on its subject which comment on the influence of Smale's work, and another article by Smale with his own retrospective views.

Embeddings in Manifolds

Embeddings in Manifolds
Author: Robert J. Daverman
Publisher: American Mathematical Soc.
Total Pages: 496
Release: 2009-10-14
Genre: Mathematics
ISBN: 0821836978

A topological embedding is a homeomorphism of one space onto a subspace of another. The book analyzes how and when objects like polyhedra or manifolds embed in a given higher-dimensional manifold. The main problem is to determine when two topological embeddings of the same object are equivalent in the sense of differing only by a homeomorphism of the ambient manifold. Knot theory is the special case of spheres smoothly embedded in spheres; in this book, much more general spaces and much more general embeddings are considered. A key aspect of the main problem is taming: when is a topological embedding of a polyhedron equivalent to a piecewise linear embedding? A central theme of the book is the fundamental role played by local homotopy properties of the complement in answering this taming question. The book begins with a fresh description of the various classic examples of wild embeddings (i.e., embeddings inequivalent to piecewise linear embeddings). Engulfing, the fundamental tool of the subject, is developed next. After that, the study of embeddings is organized by codimension (the difference between the ambient dimension and the dimension of the embedded space). In all codimensions greater than two, topological embeddings of compacta are approximated by nicer embeddings, nice embeddings of polyhedra are tamed, topological embeddings of polyhedra are approximated by piecewise linear embeddings, and piecewise linear embeddings are locally unknotted. Complete details of the codimension-three proofs, including the requisite piecewise linear tools, are provided. The treatment of codimension-two embeddings includes a self-contained, elementary exposition of the algebraic invariants needed to construct counterexamples to the approximation and existence of embeddings. The treatment of codimension-one embeddings includes the locally flat approximation theorem for manifolds as well as the characterization of local flatness in terms of local homotopy properties.

Handbook of Geometric Topology

Handbook of Geometric Topology
Author: R.B. Sher
Publisher: Elsevier
Total Pages: 1145
Release: 2001-12-20
Genre: Mathematics
ISBN: 0080532853

Geometric Topology is a foundational component of modern mathematics, involving the study of spacial properties and invariants of familiar objects such as manifolds and complexes. This volume, which is intended both as an introduction to the subject and as a wide ranging resouce for those already grounded in it, consists of 21 expository surveys written by leading experts and covering active areas of current research. They provide the reader with an up-to-date overview of this flourishing branch of mathematics.

The Hauptvermutung Book

The Hauptvermutung Book
Author: A.A. Ranicki
Publisher: Springer Science & Business Media
Total Pages: 192
Release: 2013-03-09
Genre: Mathematics
ISBN: 9401733430

The Hauptvermutung is the conjecture that any two triangulations of a poly hedron are combinatorially equivalent. The conjecture was formulated at the turn of the century, and until its resolution was a central problem of topology. Initially, it was verified for low-dimensional polyhedra, and it might have been expected that furt her development of high-dimensional topology would lead to a verification in all dimensions. However, in 1961 Milnor constructed high-dimensional polyhedra with combinatorially inequivalent triangulations, disproving the Hauptvermutung in general. These polyhedra were not manifolds, leaving open the Hauptvermu tung for manifolds. The development of surgery theory led to the disproof of the high-dimensional manifold Hauptvermutung in the late 1960's. Unfortunately, the published record of the manifold Hauptvermutung has been incomplete, as was forcefully pointed out by Novikov in his lecture at the Browder 60th birthday conference held at Princeton in March 1994. This volume brings together the original 1967 papers of Casson and Sulli van, and the 1968/1972 'Princeton notes on the Hauptvermutung' of Armstrong, Rourke and Cooke, making this work physically accessible. These papers include several other results which have become part of the folklore but of which proofs have never been published. My own contribution is intended to serve as an intro duction to the Hauptvermutung, and also to give an account of some more recent developments in the area. In preparing the original papers for publication, only minimal changes of punctuation etc.

Geometry of Subanalytic and Semialgebraic Sets

Geometry of Subanalytic and Semialgebraic Sets
Author: Masahiro Shiota
Publisher: Springer Science & Business Media
Total Pages: 445
Release: 2012-12-06
Genre: Mathematics
ISBN: 1461220084

Real analytic sets in Euclidean space (Le. , sets defined locally at each point of Euclidean space by the vanishing of an analytic function) were first investigated in the 1950's by H. Cartan [Car], H. Whitney [WI-3], F. Bruhat [W-B] and others. Their approach was to derive information about real analytic sets from properties of their complexifications. After some basic geometrical and topological facts were established, however, the study of real analytic sets stagnated. This contrasted the rapid develop ment of complex analytic geometry which followed the groundbreaking work of the early 1950's. Certain pathologies in the real case contributed to this failure to progress. For example, the closure of -or the connected components of-a constructible set (Le. , a locally finite union of differ ences of real analytic sets) need not be constructible (e. g. , R - {O} and 3 2 2 { (x, y, z) E R : x = zy2, x + y2 -=I- O}, respectively). Responding to this in the 1960's, R. Thorn [Thl], S. Lojasiewicz [LI,2] and others undertook the study of a larger class of sets, the semianalytic sets, which are the sets defined locally at each point of Euclidean space by a finite number of ana lytic function equalities and inequalities. They established that semianalytic sets admit Whitney stratifications and triangulations, and using these tools they clarified the local topological structure of these sets. For example, they showed that the closure and the connected components of a semianalytic set are semianalytic.