This textbook is designed to introduce advanced undergraduate or beginning graduate students to algebraic topology as painlessly as possible. The principal topics treated are 2-dimensional manifolds, the fundamental group, and covering spaces, plus the group theory needed in these topics.

Autorentext

William S. Massey (1920-2017) was an American mathematician known for his work in algebraic topology. The Blakers-Massey theorem and the Massey product were both named for him. His textbooks Singular Homology Theory and Algebraic Topology: An Introduction are also in the Graduate Texts in Mathematics series.

Inhalt
1: Two-Dimensional Manifolds. 2: The Fundamental Group. 3: Free Groups and Free Products of Groups. 4: Seifert and Van Kampen Theorem of the Fundamental Groups of the Union of Two Spaces. 5: Covering Spaces. 6: The Fundamental Group and Covering Spaces of a Graph. 7: The Fundamental Group of Higher Dimensional Spaces. 8: Epilogue.