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.

This book is about an investigation of recent developments in the field of sympletic and contact structures on four- and three-dimensional manifolds from a topologist’s point of view. In it, two main issues are addressed: what kind of sympletic and contact structures we can construct via surgery theory and what kind of sympletic and contact structures are not allowed via gauge theory and the newly invented Heegaard-Floer theory.

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.

Assuming no previous acquaintance with surgery theory and justifying all the algebraic concepts used by their relevance to topology, Dr Ranicki explains the applications of quadratic forms to the classification of topological manifolds, in a unified algebraic framework.

The Geometrisation Conjecture was proposed by William Thurston in the mid 1970s in order to classify compact 3-manifolds by means of a canonical decomposition along essential, embedded surfaces into pieces that possess geometric structures. It contains the famous Poincaré Conjecture as a special case. In 2002, Grigory Perelman announced a proof of the Geometrisation Conjecture based on Richard Hamilton’s Ricci flow approach, and presented it in a series of three celebrated arXiv preprints. Since then there has been an ongoing effort to understand Perelman’s work by giving more detailed and accessible presentations of his ideas or alternative arguments for various parts of the proof. This book is a contribution to this endeavour. Its two main innovations are first a simplified version of Perelman’s Ricci flow with surgery, which is called Ricci flow with bubbling-off, and secondly a completely different and original approach to the last step of the proof. In addition, special effort has been made to simplify and streamline the overall structure of the argument, and make the various parts independent of one another. A complete proof of the Geometrisation Conjecture is given, modulo pre-Perelman results on Ricci flow, Perelman’s results on the ℒ-functional and κ-solutions, as well as the Colding–Minicozzi extinction paper. The book can be read by anyone already familiar with these results, or willing to accept them as black boxes. The structure of the proof is presented in a lengthy introduction, which does not require knowledge of geometric analysis. The bulk of the proof is the existence theorem for Ricci flow with bubbling-off, which is treated in parts I and II. Part III deals with the long time behaviour of Ricci flow with bubbling-off. Part IV finishes the proof of the Geometrisation Conjecture.

Manifolds, the higher-dimensional analogs of smooth curves and surfaces, are fundamental objects in modern mathematics. Combining aspects of algebra, topology, and analysis, manifolds have also been applied to classical mechanics, general relativity, and quantum field theory. In this streamlined introduction to the subject, the theory of manifolds is presented with the aim of helping the reader achieve a rapid mastery of the essential topics. By the end of the book the reader should be able to compute, at least for simple spaces, one of the most basic topological invariants of a manifold, its de Rham cohomology. Along the way, the reader acquires the knowledge and skills necessary for further study of geometry and topology. The requisite point-set topology is included in an appendix of twenty pages; other appendices review facts from real analysis and linear algebra. Hints and solutions are provided to many of the exercises and problems. This work may be used as the text for a one-semester graduate or advanced undergraduate course, as well as by students engaged in self-study. Requiring only minimal undergraduate prerequisites, 'Introduction to Manifolds' is also an excellent foundation for Springer's GTM 82, 'Differential Forms in Algebraic Topology'.