This is the second of a three-volume set collecting the original and now-classic works in topology written during the 1950s?1960s. The original methods and constructions from these works are properly documented for the first time in this book. No existing book covers the beautiful ensemble of methods created in topology starting from approximately 1950, that is, from Serre's celebrated ?singular homologies of fiber spaces.?

1. On manifolds homeomorphic to the 7-sphere / J. Milnor -- 2. Groups of homotopy spheres. I / M. Kervaire and J. Milnor -- 3. Homotopically equivalent smooth manifolds / S.P. Novikov -- 4. Rational Pontrjagin classes. Homeomorphism and homotopy type of closed manifolds / S.P. Novikov -- 5. On manifolds with free abelian fundamental group and their applications (Pontrjagin classes, smooth structures, high-dimensional knots) / S.P. Novikov -- 6. Stable homeomorphisms and the annulus conjecture / R. Kirby

This is the second of a three-volume set collecting the original and now-classic works in topology written during the 1950s-1960s. The original methods and constructions from these works are properly documented for the first time in this book. No existing book covers the beautiful ensemble of methods created in topology starting from approximately 1950, that is, from Serre's celebrated “singular homologies of fiber spaces.”

The theory of characteristic classes provides a meeting ground for the various disciplines of differential topology, differential and algebraic geometry, cohomology, and fiber bundle theory. As such, it is a fundamental and an essential tool in the study of differentiable manifolds. In this volume, the authors provide a thorough introduction to characteristic classes, with detailed studies of Stiefel-Whitney classes, Chern classes, Pontrjagin classes, and the Euler class. Three appendices cover the basics of cohomology theory and the differential forms approach to characteristic classes, and provide an account of Bernoulli numbers. Based on lecture notes of John Milnor, which first appeared at Princeton University in 1957 and have been widely studied by graduate students of topology ever since, this published version has been completely revised and corrected.

The final volume of the three-volume edition, this book features classical papers on algebraic and differential topology published in 1950-60s. The original methods and constructions from these works are properly documented for the first time in this book. No existing book covers the beautiful ensemble of methods created in topology starting from approximately 1950. That is, from Serre's celebrated "singular homologies of fiber spaces."

The final volume of the three-volume edition, this book features classical papers on algebraic and differential topology published in the 1950s-1960s. The partition of these papers among the volumes is rather conditional. The original methods and constructions from these works are properly documented for the first time in this book. No existing book covers the beautiful ensemble of methods created in topology starting from approximately 1950. That is, from Serre's celebrated “singular homologies of fiber spaces.”

Author has written several excellent Springer books.; This book is a sequel to Introduction to Topological Manifolds; Careful and illuminating explanations, excellent diagrams and exemplary motivation; Includes short preliminary sections before each section explaining what is ahead and why