General Topology

Comprehensive text for beginning graduate-level students and professionals. "The clarity of the author's thought and the carefulness of his exposition make reading this book a pleasure." — Bulletin of the American Mathematical Society. 1955 edition.

This is the first of the encyclopaedia volumes devoted to general topology. It has two parts. The first outlines the basic concepts and constructions of general topology, including several topics which have not previously been covered in English language texts. The second part presents a survey of dimension theory, from the very beginnings to the most important recent developments. The principal ideas and methods are treated in detail, and the main results are provided with sketches of proofs. The authors have suceeded admirably in the difficult task of writing a book which will not only be accessible to the general scientist and the undergraduate, but will also appeal to the professional mathematician. The authors' efforts to detail the relationship between more specialized topics and the central themes of topology give the book a broad scholarly appeal which far transcends narrow disciplinary lines.

This book is designed for the reader who wants to get a general view of the terminology of General Topology with minimal time and effort. The reader, whom we assume to have only a rudimentary knowledge of set theory, algebra and analysis, will be able to find what they want if they will properly use the index. However, this book contains very few proofs and the reader who wants to study more systematically will find sufficiently many references in the book. Key features: • More terms from General Topology than any other book ever published• Short and informative articles• Authors include the majority of top researchers in the field• Extensive indexing of terms

Bibliotheca Mathematica: A Series of Monographs on Pure and Applied Mathematics, Volume VII: Modern General Topology focuses on the processes, operations, principles, and approaches employed in pure and applied mathematics, including spaces, cardinal and ordinal numbers, and mappings. The publication first elaborates on set, cardinal and ordinal numbers, basic concepts in topological spaces, and various topological spaces. Discussions focus on metric space, axioms of countability, compact space and paracompact space, normal space and fully normal space, subspace, product space, quotient space, and inverse limit space, convergence, mapping, and open basis and neighborhood basis. The book then ponders on compact spaces and related topics, as well as product of compact spaces, compactification, extensions of the concept of compactness, and compact space and the lattice of continuous functions. The manuscript tackles paracompact spaces and related topics, metrizable spaces and related topics, and topics related to mappings. Topics include metric space, paracompact space, and continuous mapping, theory of inverse limit space, theory of selection, mapping space, imbedding, metrizability, uniform space, countably paracompact space, and modifications of the concept of paracompactness. The book is a valuable source of data for mathematicians and researchers interested in modern general topology.

This book is a course in general topology, intended for students in the first year of the second cycle (in other words, students in their third univer sity year). The course was taught during the first semester of the 1979-80 academic year (three hours a week of lecture, four hours a week of guided work). Topology is the study of the notions of limit and continuity and thus is, in principle, very ancient. However, we shall limit ourselves to the origins of the theory since the nineteenth century. One of the sources of topology is the effort to clarify the theory of real-valued functions of a real variable: uniform continuity, uniform convergence, equicontinuity, Bolzano-Weierstrass theorem (this work is historically inseparable from the attempts to define with precision what the real numbers are). Cauchy was one of the pioneers in this direction, but the errors that slip into his work prove how hard it was to isolate the right concepts. Cantor came along a bit later; his researches into trigonometric series led him to study in detail sets of points of R (whence the concepts of open set and closed set in R, which in his work are intermingled with much subtler concepts). The foregoing alone does not justify the very general framework in which this course is set. The fact is that the concepts mentioned above have shown themselves to be useful for objects other than the real numbers.

Foundations of General Topology presents the value of careful presentations of proofs and shows the power of abstraction. This book provides a careful treatment of general topology. Organized into 11 chapters, this book begins with an overview of the important notions about cardinal and ordinal numbers. This text then presents the fundamentals of general topology in logical order processing from the most general case of a topological space to the restrictive case of a complete metric space. Other chapters consider a general method for completing a metric space that is applicable to the rationals and present the sufficient conditions for metrizability. This book discusses as well the study of spaces of real-valued continuous functions. The final chapter deals with uniform continuity of functions, which involves finding a distance that satisfies certain requirements for all points of the space simultaneously. This book is a valuable resource for students and research workers.

The first half of the book provides an introduction to general topology, with ample space given to exercises and carefully selected applications. The second half of the text includes topics in asymmetric topology, a field motivated by applications in computer science. Recurring themes include the interactions of topology with order theory and mathematics designed to model loss-of-resolution situations.

Students of topology rightly complain that much of the basic material in the subject cannot easily be found in the literature, at least not in a convenient form. In this book I have tried to take a fresh look at some of this basic material and to organize it in a coherent fashion. The text is as self-contained as I could reasonably make it and should be quite accessible to anyone who has an elementary knowledge of point-set topology and group theory. This book is based on a course of 16 graduate lectures given at Oxford and elsewhere from time to time. In a course of that length one cannot discuss too many topics without being unduly superficial. However, this was never intended as a treatise on the subject but rather as a short introductory course which will, I hope, prove useful to specialists and non-specialists alike. The introduction contains a description of the contents. No algebraic or differen tial topology is involved, although I have borne in mind the needs of students of those branches of the subject. Exercises for the reader are scattered throughout the text, while suggestions for further reading are contained in the lists of references at the end of each chapter. In most cases these lists include the main sources I have drawn on, but this is not the type of book where it is practicable to give a reference for everything.