| This book constitutes nothing less than an up-to-date survey of the whole field of topology (with the exception of "general (set-theoretic) topology"), or, in the words of Novikov himself, of what was termed at the end of the 19th century "Analysis Situs", and subsequently diversified into the various subfields of combinatorial, algebraic, differential, homotopic, and geometric topology. It gives an overview of these subfields, beginning with the elements and proceeding right up to the present frontiers of research. Thus one finds here the whole range of topological concepts from fibre spaces, CW-complexes, homology and homotopy, through bordism theory and K-theory to the Adams-Novikov spectral sequence, and an exhaustive (but necessarily concentrated) survey of the theory of manifolds. An appendix sketching the recent impressive developments in the theory of knots and links and low-dimensional topology generally, brings the survey right up to the present. This work is the flagship of the topology subseries of the Encyclopaedia. |
