An advanced treatment of surgery theory for graduate students and researchers Surgery theory, a subfield of geometric topology, is the study of the classifications of manifolds. A Course on Surgery Theory offers a modern look at this important mathematical discipline and some of its applications. In this book, Stanley Chang and Shmuel Weinberger explain some of the triumphs of surgery theory during the past three decades, from both an algebraic and geometric point of view. They also provide an extensive treatment of basic ideas, main theorems, active applications, and recent literature. The authors methodically cover all aspects of surgery theory, connecting it to other relevant areas of mathematics, including geometry, homotopy theory, analysis, and algebra. Later chapters are self-contained, so readers can study them directly based on topic interest. Of significant use to high-dimensional topologists and researchers in noncommutative geometry and algebraic K-theory, A Course on Surgery Theory serves as an important resource for the mathematics community.

An advanced treatment of surgery theory for graduate students and researchers Surgery theory, a subfield of geometric topology, is the study of the classifications of manifolds. A Course on Surgery Theory offers a modern look at this important mathematical discipline and some of its applications. In this book, Stanley Chang and Shmuel Weinberger explain some of the triumphs of surgery theory during the past three decades, from both an algebraic and geometric point of view. They also provide an extensive treatment of basic ideas, main theorems, active applications, and recent literature. The authors methodically cover all aspects of surgery theory, connecting it to other relevant areas of mathematics, including geometry, homotopy theory, analysis, and algebra. Later chapters are self-contained, so readers can study them directly based on topic interest. Of significant use to high-dimensional topologists and researchers in noncommutative geometry and algebraic K-theory, A Course on Surgery Theory serves as an important resource for the mathematics community.

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, co-bordism, 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 book grew out of courses which I taught at Cornell University and the University of Warwick during 1969 and 1970. I wrote it because of a strong belief that there should be readily available a semi-historical and geo metrically motivated exposition of J. H. C. Whitehead's beautiful theory of simple-homotopy types; that the best way to understand this theory is to know how and why it was built. This belief is buttressed by the fact that the major uses of, and advances in, the theory in recent times-for example, the s-cobordism theorem (discussed in §25), the use of the theory in surgery, its extension to non-compact complexes (discussed at the end of §6) and the proof of topological invariance (given in the Appendix)-have come from just such an understanding. A second reason for writing the book is pedagogical. This is an excellent subject for a topology student to "grow up" on. The interplay between geometry and algebra in topology, each enriching the other, is beautifully illustrated in simple-homotopy theory. The subject is accessible (as in the courses mentioned at the outset) to students who have had a good one semester course in algebraic topology. I have tried to write proofs which meet the needs of such students. (When a proof was omitted and left as an exercise, it was done with the welfare of the student in mind. He should do such exercises zealously.

The publication of this book in 1970 marked the culmination of a period in the history of the topology of manifolds. This edition, based on the original text, is supplemented by notes on subsequent developments and updated references and commentaries.

This book is an exposition of the technique of surgery on simply-connected smooth manifolds. Systematic study of differentiable manifolds using these ideas was begun by Milnor [45] and Wallace [68] and developed extensively in the last ten years. It is now possible to give a reasonably complete theory of simply-connected manifolds of dimension ~ 5 using this approach and that is what I will try to begin here. The emphasis has been placed on stating and proving the general results necessary to apply this method in various contexts. In Chapter II, these results are stated, and then applications are given to characterizing the homotopy type of differentiable manifolds and classifying manifolds within a given homotopy type. This theory was first extensively developed in Kervaire and Milnor [34] in the case of homotopy spheres, globalized by S. P. Novikov [49] and the author [6] for closed 1-connected manifolds, and extended to the bounded case by Wall [65] and Golo [23]. The thesis of Sullivan [62] reformed the theory in an elegant way in terms of classifying spaces.

The Description for this book, Exact Sequences in the Algebraic Theory of Surgery. (MN-26): , will be forthcoming.