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.

...there are reasons enough to warrant a coherent treatment of the main body of differential topology in the realm of Banach manifolds, which is at the same time correct and complete. This book fills the gap: whenever possible the manifolds treated are Banach manifolds with corners. Corners add to the complications and the authors have carefully fathomed the validity of all main results at corners. Even in finite dimensions some results at corners are more complete and better thought out here than elsewhere in the literature. The proofs are correct and with all details. I see this book as a reliable monograph of a well-defined subject; the possibility to fall back to it adds to the feeling of security when climbing in the more dangerous realms of infinite dimensional differential geometry. Peter W. Michor

"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

A. Banyaga: On the group of diffeomorphisms preserving an exact symplectic.- G.A. Fredricks: Some remarks on Cauchy-Riemann structures.- A. Haefliger: Differentiable Cohomology.- J.N. Mather: On the homology of Haefliger’s classifying space.- P. Michor: Manifolds of differentiable maps.- V. Poenaru: Some remarks on low-dimensional topology and immersion theory.- F. Sergeraert: La classe de cobordisme des feuilletages de Reeb de S3 est nulle.- G. Wallet: Invariant de Godbillon-Vey et difféomorphismes commutants.

The remarkable developments in differential topology and how these recent advances have been applied as a primary research tool in quantum field theory are presented here in a style reflecting the genuinely two-sided interaction between mathematical physics and applied mathematics. The author, following his previous work (Nash/Sen: Differential Topology for Physicists, Academic Press, 1983), covers elliptic differential and pseudo-differential operators, Atiyah-Singer index theory, topological quantum field theory, string theory, and knot theory. The explanatory approach serves to illuminate and clarify these theories for graduate students and research workers entering the field for the first time. Treats differential geometry, differential topology, and quantum field theory Includes elliptic differential and pseudo-differential operators, Atiyah-Singer index theory, topological quantum field theory, string theory, and knot theory Tackles problems of quantum field theory using differential topology as a tool

This book gives a comprehensive introduction to the theory of smooth manifolds, maps, and fundamental associated structures with an emphasis on “bare hands” approaches, combining differential-topological cut-and-paste procedures and applications of transversality. In particular, the smooth cobordism cup-product is defined from scratch and used as the main tool in a variety of settings. After establishing the fundamentals, the book proceeds to a broad range of more advanced topics in differential topology, including degree theory, the Poincaré-Hopf index theorem, bordism-characteristic numbers, and the Pontryagin-Thom construction. Cobordism intersection forms are used to classify compact surfaces; their quadratic enhancements are developed and applied to studying the homotopy groups of spheres, the bordism group of immersed surfaces in a 3-manifold, and congruences mod 16 for the signature of intersection forms of 4-manifolds. Other topics include the high-dimensional h h-cobordism theorem stressing the role of the “Whitney trick”, a determination of the singleton bordism modules in low dimensions, and proofs of parallelizability of orientable 3-manifolds and the Lickorish-Wallace theorem. Nash manifolds and Nash's questions on the existence of real algebraic models are also discussed. This book will be useful as a textbook for beginning masters and doctoral students interested in differential topology, who have finished a standard undergraduate mathematics curriculum. It emphasizes an active learning approach, and exercises are included within the text as part of the flow of ideas. Experienced readers may use this book as a source of alternative, constructive approaches to results commonly presented in more advanced contexts with specialized techniques.

Exploring the full scope of differential topology, this comprehensive account of geometric techniques for studying the topology of smooth manifolds offers a wide perspective on the field. Building up from first principles, concepts of manifolds are introduced, supplemented by thorough appendices giving background on topology and homotopy theory. Deep results are then developed from these foundations through in-depth treatments of the notions of general position and transversality, proper actions of Lie groups, handles (up to the h-cobordism theorem), immersions and embeddings, concluding with the surgery procedure and cobordism theory. Fully illustrated and rigorous in its approach, little prior knowledge is assumed, and yet growing complexity is instilled throughout. This structure gives advanced students and researchers an accessible route into the wide-ranging field of differential topology.

Modern topology uses very diverse methods. This book is devoted largely to methods of combinatorial topology, which reduce the study of topological spaces to investigations of their partitions into elementary sets, and to methods of differential topology, which deal with smooth manifolds and smooth maps. Many topological problems can be solved by using either of these two kinds of methods, combinatorial or differential. In such cases, both approaches are discussed. One of the main goals of this book is to advance as far as possible in the study of the properties of topological spaces (especially manifolds) without employing complicated techniques. This distinguishes it from the majority of other books on topology. The book contains many problems; almost all of them are supplied with hints or complete solutions.

The recent revolution in differential topology related to the discovery of non-standard (”exotic”) smoothness structures on topologically trivial manifolds such as R4 suggests many exciting opportunities for applications of potentially deep importance for the spacetime models of theoretical physics, especially general relativity. This rich panoply of new differentiable structures lies in the previously unexplored region between topology and geometry. Just as physical geometry was thought to be trivial before Einstein, physicists have continued to work under the tacit — but now shown to be incorrect — assumption that differentiability is uniquely determined by topology for simple four-manifolds. Since diffeomorphisms are the mathematical models for physical coordinate transformations, Einstein's relativity principle requires that these models be physically inequivalent. This book provides an introductory survey of some of the relevant mathematics and presents preliminary results and suggestions for further applications to spacetime models.

In this book, two seemingly unrelated fields -- algebraic topology and robust control -- are brought together. The book develops algebraic/differential topology from an application-oriented point of view. The book takes the reader on a path starting from a well-motivated robust stability problem, showing the relevance of the simplicial approximation theorem and how it can be efficiently implemented using computational geometry. The simplicial approximation theorem serves as a primer to more serious topological issues such as the obstruction to extending the Nyquist map, K-theory of robust stabilization, and eventually the differential topology of the Nyquist map, culminating in the explanation of the lack of continuity of the stability margin relative to rounding errors. The book is suitable for graduate students in engineering and/or applied mathematics, academic researchers and governmental laboratories.