Author: John Milnor
Publisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN: 0691273715
Category : Mathematics
Languages : en
Pages : 125
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Book Description
Important lectures on differential topology by acclaimed mathematician John Milnor These are notes from lectures that John Milnor delivered as a seminar on differential topology in 1963 at Princeton University. These lectures give a new proof of the h-cobordism theorem that is different from the original proof presented by Stephen Smale. Milnor's goal was to provide a fully rigorous proof in terms of Morse functions. This book remains an important resource in the application of Morse theory.
Author: Augustin Banyaga
Publisher: Springer Science & Business Media
ISBN: 140202696X
Category : Mathematics
Languages : en
Pages : 330
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Book Description
This book offers a detailed presentation of results needed to prove the Morse Homology Theorem using classical techniques from algebraic topology and homotopy theory. The text presents results that were formerly scattered in the mathematical literature, in a single reference with complete and detailed proofs. The core material includes CW-complexes, Morse theory, hyperbolic dynamical systems (the Lamba-Lemma, the Stable/Unstable Manifold Theorem), transversality theory, the Morse-Smale-Witten boundary operator, and Conley index theory.
Author: John Willard Milnor
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages :
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Book Description
Author: John Milnor
Publisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN: 1400881803
Category : Mathematics
Languages : en
Pages : 163
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Book Description
One of the most cited books in mathematics, John Milnor's exposition of Morse theory has been the most important book on the subject for more than forty years. Morse theory was developed in the 1920s by mathematician Marston Morse. (Morse was on the faculty of the Institute for Advanced Study, and Princeton published his Topological Methods in the Theory of Functions of a Complex Variable in the Annals of Mathematics Studies series in 1947.) One classical application of Morse theory includes the attempt to understand, with only limited information, the large-scale structure of an object. This kind of problem occurs in mathematical physics, dynamic systems, and mechanical engineering. Morse theory has received much attention in the last two decades as a result of a famous paper in which theoretical physicist Edward Witten relates Morse theory to quantum field theory. Milnor was awarded the Fields Medal (the mathematical equivalent of a Nobel Prize) in 1962 for his work in differential topology. He has since received the National Medal of Science (1967) and the Steele Prize from the American Mathematical Society twice (1982 and 2004) in recognition of his explanations of mathematical concepts across a wide range of scienti.c disciplines. The citation reads, "The phrase sublime elegance is rarely associated with mathematical exposition, but it applies to all of Milnor's writings. Reading his books, one is struck with the ease with which the subject is unfolding and it only becomes apparent after re.ection that this ease is the mark of a master.? Milnor has published five books with Princeton University Press.
Author: A.A. Ranicki
Publisher: Springer Science & Business Media
ISBN: 9401733430
Category : Mathematics
Languages : en
Pages : 192
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Book Description
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.
Author: Selman Akbulut
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0191087769
Category : Mathematics
Languages : en
Pages : 221
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Book Description
This book presents the topology of smooth 4-manifolds in an intuitive self-contained way, developed over a number of years by Professor Akbulut. The text is aimed at graduate students and focuses on the teaching and learning of the subject, giving a direct approach to constructions and theorems which are supplemented by exercises to help the reader work through the details not covered in the proofs. The book contains a hundred colour illustrations to demonstrate the ideas rather than providing long-winded and potentially unclear explanations. Key results have been selected that relate to the material discussed and the author has provided examples of how to analyse them with the techniques developed in earlier chapters.
Author: Sylvain Cappell
Publisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN: 1400865212
Category : Mathematics
Languages : en
Pages : 446
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Book Description
Surgery theory, the basis for the classification theory of manifolds, is now about forty years old. The sixtieth birthday (on December 14, 1996) of C.T.C. Wall, a leading member of the subject's founding generation, led the editors of this volume to reflect on the extraordinary accomplishments of surgery theory as well as its current enormously varied interactions with algebra, analysis, and geometry. Workers in many of these areas have often lamented the lack of a single source surveying surgery theory and its applications. Because no one person could write such a survey, the editors asked a variety of experts to report on the areas of current interest. This is the second of two volumes resulting from that collective effort. It will be useful to topologists, to other interested researchers, and to advanced students. The topics covered include current applications of surgery, Wall's finiteness obstruction, algebraic surgery, automorphisms and embeddings of manifolds, surgery theoretic methods for the study of group actions and stratified spaces, metrics of positive scalar curvature, and surgery in dimension four. In addition to the editors, the contributors are S. Ferry, M. Weiss, B. Williams, T. Goodwillie, J. Klein, S. Weinberger, B. Hughes, S. Stolz, R. Kirby, L. Taylor, and F. Quinn.
Author: Denis Ch‚niot
Publisher: World Scientific
ISBN: 9812704108
Category : Mathematics
Languages : en
Pages : 1083
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Book Description
The Singularity School and Conference took place in Luminy, Marseille, from January 24th to February 25th 2005. More than 180 mathematicians from over 30 countries converged to discuss recent developments in singularity theory.The volume contains the elementary and advanced courses conducted by singularities specialists during the conference, general lectures on singularity theory, and lectures on applications of the theory to various domains. The subjects range from geometry and topology of singularities, through real and complex singularities, to applications of singularities.
Author: C. T. C. Wall
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1107153522
Category : Mathematics
Languages : en
Pages : 355
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Book Description
Exploring the full scope of differential topology, this comprehensive account of geometric techniques for studying the topology of smooth manifolds offers a wide perspective on the field. Building up from first principles, concepts of manifolds are introduced, supplemented by thorough appendices giving background on topology and homotopy theory. Deep results are then developed from these foundations through in-depth treatments of the notions of general position and transversality, proper actions of Lie groups, handles (up to the h-cobordism theorem), immersions and embeddings, concluding with the surgery procedure and cobordism theory. Fully illustrated and rigorous in its approach, little prior knowledge is assumed, and yet growing complexity is instilled throughout. This structure gives advanced students and researchers an accessible route into the wide-ranging field of differential topology.
Author: William Browder
Publisher: Springer Science & Business Media
ISBN: 364250020X
Category : Mathematics
Languages : en
Pages : 141
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Book Description
This book is an exposition of the technique of surgery on simply-connected smooth manifolds. Systematic study of differentiable manifolds using these ideas was begun by Milnor [45] and Wallace [68] and developed extensively in the last ten years. It is now possible to give a reasonably complete theory of simply-connected manifolds of dimension ~ 5 using this approach and that is what I will try to begin here. The emphasis has been placed on stating and proving the general results necessary to apply this method in various contexts. In Chapter II, these results are stated, and then applications are given to characterizing the homotopy type of differentiable manifolds and classifying manifolds within a given homotopy type. This theory was first extensively developed in Kervaire and Milnor [34] in the case of homotopy spheres, globalized by S. P. Novikov [49] and the author [6] for closed 1-connected manifolds, and extended to the bounded case by Wall [65] and Golo [23]. The thesis of Sullivan [62] reformed the theory in an elegant way in terms of classifying spaces.
