Ordered Groups And Topology

This book deals with the connections between topology and ordered groups. It begins with a self-contained introduction to orderable groups and from there explores the interactions between orderability and objects in low-dimensional topology, such as knot theory, braid groups, and 3-manifolds, as well as groups of homeomorphisms and other topological structures. The book also addresses recent applications of orderability in the studies of codimension-one foliations and Heegaard-Floer homology. The use of topological methods in proving algebraic results is another feature of the book. The book w.

This book deals with the connections between topology and ordered groups. It begins with a self-contained introduction to orderable groups and from there explores the interactions between orderability and objects in low-dimensional topology, such as knot theory, braid groups, and 3-manifolds, as well as groups of homeomorphisms and other topological structures. The book also addresses recent applications of orderability in the studies of codimension-one foliations and Heegaard-Floer homology. The use of topological methods in proving algebraic results is another feature of the book. The book was written to serve both as a textbook for graduate students, containing many exercises, and as a reference for researchers in topology, algebra, and dynamical systems. A basic background in group theory and topology is the only prerequisite for the reader.

Concise treatment covers semitopological groups, locally compact groups, Harr measure, and duality theory and some of its applications. The volume concludes with a chapter that introduces Banach algebras. 1966 edition.

The study of groups equipped with a compatible lattice order ("lattice-ordered groups" or "I!-groups") has arisen in a number of different contexts. Examples of this include the study of ideals and divisibility, dating back to the work of Dedekind and continued by Krull; the pioneering work of Hahn on totally ordered abelian groups; and the work of Kantorovich and other analysts on partially ordered function spaces. After the Second World War, the theory of lattice-ordered groups became a subject of study in its own right, following the publication of fundamental papers by Birkhoff, Nakano and Lorenzen. The theory blossomed under the leadership of Paul Conrad, whose important papers in the 1960s provided the tools for describing the structure for many classes of I!-groups in terms of their convex I!-subgroups. A particularly significant success of this approach was the generalization of Hahn's embedding theorem to the case of abelian lattice-ordered groups, work done with his students John Harvey and Charles Holland. The results of this period are summarized in Conrad's "blue notes" [C].

The Geometry and Topology of Coxeter Groups is a comprehensive and authoritative treatment of Coxeter groups from the viewpoint of geometric group theory. Groups generated by reflections are ubiquitous in mathematics, and there are classical examples of reflection groups in spherical, Euclidean, and hyperbolic geometry. Any Coxeter group can be realized as a group generated by reflection on a certain contractible cell complex, and this complex is the principal subject of this book. The book explains a theorem of Moussong that demonstrates that a polyhedral metric on this cell complex is nonpositively curved, meaning that Coxeter groups are "CAT(0) groups." The book describes the reflection group trick, one of the most potent sources of examples of aspherical manifolds. And the book discusses many important topics in geometric group theory and topology, including Hopf's theory of ends; contractible manifolds and homology spheres; the Poincaré Conjecture; and Gromov's theory of CAT(0) spaces and groups. Finally, the book examines connections between Coxeter groups and some of topology's most famous open problems concerning aspherical manifolds, such as the Euler Characteristic Conjecture and the Borel and Singer conjectures.

This book offers an essential review of central theories, current research and applications in the field of numerical representations of ordered structures. It is intended as a tribute to Professor Ghanshyam B. Mehta, one of the leading specialists on the numerical representability of ordered structures, and covers related applications to utility theory, mathematical economics, social choice theory and decision-making. Taken together, the carefully selected contributions provide readers with an authoritative review of this research field, as well as the knowledge they need to apply the theories and methods in their own work.