This elegant book by distinguished mathematician John Milnor, provides a clear and succinct introduction to one of the most important subjects in modern mathematics. Beginning with basic concepts such as diffeomorphisms and smooth manifolds, he goes on to examine tangent spaces, oriented manifolds, and vector fields. Key concepts such as homotopy, the index number of a map, and the Pontryagin construction are discussed. The author presents proofs of Sard's theorem and the Hopf theorem.
These lectures provide students and specialists with preliminary and valuable information from university courses and seminars in mathematics. This set gives new proof of the h-cobordism theorem that is different from the original proof presented by S. Smale. Originally published in 1965. The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.
This text studies the dynamics of iterated holomorphic mappings from a Riemann surface to itself, concentrating on the classical case of rational maps of the Riemann sphere. It is based on introductory lectures given by the author at Stony Brook, NY, in the past ten years. The subject is large and rapidly growing. These notes are intended to introduce the reader to some key ideas in the field, and to form a basis for further study. The reader is assumed to be familiar with the rudiments of complex variable theory and of two-dimensional differential geometry, as well as some basic topics from topology. The exposition is clear and enriched by many beautiful illustrations.