Differential Topology provides an elementary and intuitive introduction to the study of smooth manifolds. In the years since its first publication, Guillemin and Pollack's book has become a standard text on the subject. It is a jewel of mathematical exposition, judiciously picking exactly the right mixture of detail and generality to display the richness within. The text is mostly self-contained, requiring only undergraduate analysis and linear algebra. By relying on a unifying idea--transversality--the authors are able to avoid the use of big machinery or ad hoc techniques to establish the main results. In this way, they present intelligent treatments of important theorems, such as the Lefschetz fixed-point theorem, the Poincaré-Hopf index theorem, and Stokes theorem. The book has a wealth of exercises of various types. Some are routine explorations of the main material. In others, the students are guided step-by-step through proofs of fundamental results, such as the Jordan-Brouwer separation theorem. An exercise section in Chapter 4 leads the student through a construction of de Rham cohomology and a proof of its homotopy invariance. The book is suitable for either an introductory graduate course or an advanced undergraduate course.

"A very valuable book. In little over 200 pages, it presents a well-organized and surprisingly comprehensive treatment of most of the basic material in differential topology, as far as is accessible without the methods of algebraic topology....There is an abundance of exercises, which supply many beautiful examples and much interesting additional information, and help the reader to become thoroughly familiar with the material of the main text." —MATHEMATICAL REVIEWS

This book is intended as an elementary introduction to differential manifolds. The authors concentrate on the intuitive geometric aspects and explain not only the basic properties but also teach how to do the basic geometrical constructions. An integral part of the work are the many diagrams which illustrate the proofs. The text is liberally supplied with exercises and will be welcomed by students with some basic knowledge of analysis and topology.

This text covers topological spaces and properties, some advanced calculus, differentiable manifolds, orientability, submanifolds and an embedding theorem, tangent spaces, vector fields and integral curves, Whitney's embedding theorem, more. Includes 88 helpful illustrations. 1982 edition.

This book is a well-informed and detailed analysis of the problems and development of algebraic topology, from Poincaré and Brouwer to Serre, Adams, and Thom. The author has examined each significant paper along this route and describes the steps and strategy of its proofs and its relation to other work. Previously, the history of the many technical developments of 20th-century mathematics had seemed to present insuperable obstacles to scholarship. This book demonstrates in the case of topology how these obstacles can be overcome, with enlightening results.... Within its chosen boundaries the coverage of this book is superb. Read it! —MathSciNet

The book is a continuation of the previous book by the author (Elements of Combinatorial and Differential Topology, Graduate Studies in Mathematics, Volume 74, American Mathematical Society, 2006). It starts with the definition of simplicial homology and cohomology, with many examples and applications. Then the Kolmogorov-Alexander multiplication in cohomology is introduced. A significant part of the book is devoted to applications of simplicial homology and cohomology to obstruction theory, in particular, to characteristic classes of vector bundles. The later chapters are concerned with singular homology and cohomology, and Cech and de Rham cohomology. The book ends with various applications of homology to the topology of manifolds, some of which might be of interest to experts in the area. The book contains many problems; almost all of them are provided with hints or complete solutions.

Developed from a first-year graduate course in algebraic topology, this text is an informal introduction to some of the main ideas of contemporary homotopy and cohomology theory. The materials are structured around four core areas: de Rham theory, the Cech-de Rham complex, spectral sequences, and characteristic classes. By using the de Rham theory of differential forms as a prototype of cohomology, the machineries of algebraic topology are made easier to assimilate. With its stress on concreteness, motivation, and readability, this book is equally suitable for self-study and as a one-semester course in topology.