Foundational Essays On Topological Manifolds Smoothings And Triangulations

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 Appendices provide a full discussion of the classification of homotopy tori, including Casson's unpublished work and a consideration of periodicity in topological surgery.

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 Appendices provide a full discussion of the classification of homotopy tori, including Casson's unpublished work and a consideration of periodicity in topological surgery.

An extraordinary mathematical conference was held 5-9 August 1990 at the University of California at Berkeley: From Topology to Computation: Unity and Diversity in the Mathematical Sciences An International Research Conference in Honor of Stephen Smale's 60th Birthday The topics of the conference were some of the fields in which Smale has worked: • Differential Topology • Mathematical Economics • Dynamical Systems • Theory of Computation • Nonlinear Functional Analysis • Physical and Biological Applications This book comprises the proceedings of that conference. The goal of the conference was to gather in a single meeting mathemati cians working in the many fields to which Smale has made lasting con tributions. The theme "Unity and Diversity" is enlarged upon in the section entitled "Research Themes and Conference Schedule." The organizers hoped that illuminating connections between seemingly separate mathematical sub jects would emerge from the conference. Since such connections are not easily made in formal mathematical papers, the conference included discussions after each of the historical reviews of Smale's work in different fields. In addition, there was a final panel discussion at the end of the conference.

"The study of triangulations of topological spaces has always been at the root of geometric topology. Among the most studied triangulations are piecewise linear triangulations of high-dimensional topological manifolds. Their study culminated in the late 1960s-early 1970s in a complete classification in the work of Kirby and Siebenmann. It is this classification that we discuss in this book, including the celebrated Hauptvermutung and Triangulation Conjecture. The goal of this book is to provide a readable and well-organized exposition of the subject, which would be suitable for advanced graduate students in topology. An exposition like this is currently lacking."--

Based on Fields medal winning work of Michael Freedman, this book explores the disc embedding theorem for 4-dimensional manifolds. This theorem underpins virtually all our understanding of topological 4-manifolds. Most famously, this includes the 4-dimensional Poincaré conjecture in the topological category. The Disc Embedding Theorem contains the first thorough and approachable exposition of Freedman's proof of the disc embedding theorem, with many new details. A self-contained account of decomposition space theory, a beautiful but outmoded branch of topology that produces non-differentiable homeomorphisms between manifolds, is provided, as well as a stand-alone interlude that explains the disc embedding theorem's key role in all known homeomorphism classifications of 4-manifolds via surgery theory and the s-cobordism theorem. Additionally, the ramifications of the disc embedding theorem within the study of topological 4-manifolds, for example Frank Quinn's development of fundamental tools like transversality are broadly described. The book is written for mathematicians, within the subfield of topology, specifically interested in the study of 4-dimensional spaces, and includes numerous professionally rendered figures.

'0Keywords:Differential Topology;Dynamical Systems;Economic Theory;Theory of Computation;Global Analysis;Stephen Smale“The three-volume collected works of S Smale are a very welcome addition to every mathematician''s book shelf and a must for a mathematics department library.”Mathematical Reviews'

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.

This book contains expository papers that give an up-to-date account of recent developments and open problems in the geometry and topology of manifolds, along with several research articles that present new results appearing in published form for the first time. The unifying theme is the problem of understanding manifolds in low dimensions, notably in dimensions three and four, and the techniques include algebraic topology, surgery theory, Donaldson and Seiberg-Witten gauge theory, Heegaard Floer homology, contact and symplectic geometry, and Gromov-Witten invariants. The articles collected for this volume were contributed by participants of the Conference "Geometry and Topology of Manifolds" held at McMaster University on May 14-18, 2004 and are representative of the many excellent talks delivered at the conference.