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.

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.

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 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 monograph provides a comprehensive introduction to surgery theory, the main tool in the classification of manifolds. Surgery theory was developed to carry out the so-called Surgery Program, a basic strategy to decide whether two closed manifolds are homeomorphic or diffeomorphic. This book provides a detailed explanation of all the ingredients necessary for carrying out the surgery program, as well as an in-depth discussion of the obstructions that arise. The components include the surgery step, the surgery obstruction groups, surgery obstructions, and the surgery exact sequence. This machinery is applied to homotopy spheres, the classification of certain fake spaces, and topological rigidity. The book also offers a detailed description of Ranicki's chain complex version, complete with a proof of its equivalence to the classical approach developed by Browder, Novikov, Sullivan, and Wall. This book has been written for learning surgery theory and includes numerous exercises. With full proofs and detailed explanations, it also provides an invaluable reference for working mathematicians. Each chapter has been designed to be largely self-contained and includes a guide to help readers navigate the material, making the book highly suitable for lecture courses, seminars, and reading courses.

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.

Originally published in 1992, Medical Theory, Surgical Practice examines medical and surgical concepts of disease and their relation to the practice of surgery, in particular historical settings. It emphasises that understanding concepts of disease does not just include recounting explicit accounts of disease given by medical men. It needs an analysis of the social relations embedded in such concepts. In doing this, the contributors illustrate how surgery rose from a relatively humble place in seventeenth century life to being seen as one of the great achievements of late Victorian culture. They examine how medical theory and surgical practices relate to social contexts, how physical diagnosis entered medicine and whether anaesthesia and Lister’s antiseptic techniques really did cause a revolution in surgical practice.