Kirjahaku

This book is an introduction to surgery theory: the standard classification method for high-dimensional manifolds. It is aimed at graduate students who have already had a basic topology course, and would now like to understand the topology of high-dimensional manifolds. This text contains entry-level accounts of the various prerequisites of both algebra and topology, including basic homotopy and homology, Poincare duality, bundles, cobordism, embeddings, immersions, Whitehead torsion, Poincare complexes, spherical fibrations and quadratic forms and formations. While concentrating on the basic mechanics of surgery, this book includes many worked examples, useful drawings for illustration of the algebra and references for further reading.

This is the first unified treatment in book form of the lower K-groups of Bass and the lower L-groups of the author. These groups arise as the Grothendieck groups of modules and quadratic forms which are components of the K- and L-groups of polynomial extensions. They are important in the topology of non-compact manifolds such as Euclidean spaces, being the value groups for Whitehead torsion, the Siebemann end obstruction and the Wall finiteness and surgery obstructions. Some of the applications to topology are included, such as the obstruction theories for splitting homotopy equivalences and for fibering compact manifolds over the circle. Only elementary algebraic constructions are used, which are always motivated by topology. The material is accessible to a wide mathematical audience, especially graduate students and research workers in topology and algebra.

High-dimensional knot theory is the study of the embeddings of n-dimensional manifolds in (n+2)-dimensional manifolds, generalizing the traditional study of knots in the case n=1. The main theme is the application of the author's algebraic theory of surgery to provide a unified treatment of the invariants of codimension 2 embeddings, generalizing the Alexander polynomials and Seifert forms of classical knot theory. Many results in the research literature are thus brought into a single framework, and new results are obtained. The treatment is particularly effective in dealing with open books, which are manifolds with codimension 2 submanifolds such that the complement fibres over a circle. The book concludes with an appendix by E. Winkelnkemper on the history of open books.

High-dimensional knot theory is the study of the embeddings of n-dimensional manifolds in (n+2)-dimensional manifolds, generalizing the traditional study of knots in the case n=1. The main theme is the application of the author's algebraic theory of surgery to provide a unified treatment of the invariants of codimension 2 embeddings, generalizing the Alexander polynomials and Seifert forms of classical knot theory. Many results in the research literature are thus brought into a single framework, and new results are obtained. The treatment is particularly effective in dealing with open books, which are manifolds with codimension 2 submanifolds such that the complement fibres over a circle. The book concludes with an appendix by E. Winkelnkemper on the history of open books.