Designed as a text for a one-year first course in topology, this authoritative volume offers an excellent general treatment of the main ideas of topology. It includes a large number and variety of topics from classical topology as well as newer areas of research activity. There are four set-theoretic chapters, followed by four primarily algebraic chapters. Chapter I covers the fundamentals of topological and metrical spaces, mappings, compactness, product spaces, the Tychonoff theorem, function spaces, uniform continuity and uniform spaces. The next two chapters are devoted to topics in point-set topology: various separation axioms, continua in Hausdorff spaces, real-valued functions, and more Chapter IV is on homotopy theory. Chapter V covers basic material on geometric and abstract simplicial complexes and their subdivisions. Chapter VI is devoted to simplicial homology theory, Chapter VII covers various topics in algebraic topology, including relative homology, exact sequences, the Mayer-Vietoris sequence, and more. Finally, Chapter VIII discusses Cech homology. There are a large number of illuminating examples, counter-examples and problems, both those which test the understanding and those which deepen it. The authors have also made a special effort to make this an "open-ended" book, i.e while many topics are covered, there is much beyond the confines of this book. In many instances they have attempted to show the direction in which further material may be found. Topology is so fundamental, its influence is apparent in almost every other branch of mathematics, as well as such fields as symbolic logic, mechanics, geography, network theory, and even psychology. This well-written text offers a clear and careful exposition of this increasingly important discipline.
