Basic Algebraic Topology and its Applications

Mahima Ranjan Adhikari, PhD, is a former professor of Pure Mathematics at the University of Calcutta. His main interest lies in algebra and topology. He has published a number of papers in several international journals including the Proceedings of American Mathematical Society and five textbooks. Eleven students have already been awarded the PhD degree under his supervision. He is a member of the American Mathematical Society and serves on the editorial board of several journals and research monographs. He was the president of the mathematical science section of the 95th Indian Science Congress, 2008. He has visited several institutions in India, USA, UK, Japan, France, Greece, Sweden, Switzerland, Italy and many other countries on invitation. While visiting E.T.H., Zurich, Switzerland, in 2003, he made an academic interaction with Professor B Eckmann and P J Hilton. He is currently the president of the Institute for Mathematics, Bioinformatics, Information Technology and Computer Science (IMBIC). He is also the principal investigator of an ongoing project funded by the Government of India. The present book is written based on author’s teaching experience of 50 years. He is the joint author ( with Avishek Adhikari) of another Springer book “Basic Modern Algebra with Applications”, 2014.

Prerequisite Concepts and Notations.- Basic Homotopy.- The Fundamental Groups.-Covering Spaces.- Fibre Bundles, Vector Bundles and K-theory.- Geometry of Simplicial Complexes and Fundamental Groups.- Higher Homotopy Groups.- Products in Higher Homotopy Groups.- CW-complexes and Homotopy.- Eilenberg-MacLane Spaces.- Homology and Cohomology Theories.- Eilenberg-Steenrod Axioms for Homology and Cohomology Theories.- Consequences of the Eilenberg-Steenrod Axioms.- Some Applications of Homology Theory.- Spectral Homology and Cohomology Theories.- Obstruction Theory.- More Relations Between Homotopy and Homology Groups.- A Brief Historical Note.