Explorations in Topology: Map Coloring, Surfaces and Knots - Softcover

Gay, David

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1493300881 ISBN 13: 9781493300884

Publisher: Academic Press, 2014

Synopsis

This book gives students a rich experience with low-dimensional topology, enhances their geometrical and topological intuition, empowers them with new approaches to solving problems, and provides them with experiences that would help them make sense of a future, more formal topology course. The innovative story-line style of the text models the problems-solving process, presents the development of concepts in a natural way, and through its informality seduces the reader into engagement with the material. The end-of-chapter Investigations give the reader opportunities to work on a variety of open-ended, non-routine problems, and, through a modified "Moore method" to make conjectures from which theorems emerge. The students themselves emerge from these experiences owning concepts and results. The end-of-chapter Notes provide historical background to the chapter's ideas, introduce standard terminology, and make connections with mainstream mathematics. The final chapter of projects provides opportunities for continued involvement in "research" beyond the topics of the book.

About this title

Review

"...the tasks that are asked of the reader are challenging and require clear thinking. This text could be an exiting tool for self study or a non-traditional course that is not just based on lectures."--Zentralblatt MATH, Sep-14 "Each chapter ends with a section marked "Notes", typically about two pages long, which gives a somewhat broader perspective of the material covered in that chapter, typically placing each topic in historical context, and sometimes giving precise definitions and statements of theorems."--MAA.org, May 4, 2014

About the Author

David Gay joined Intel Research in Berkeley in 2001 where he has been a designer and the principal implementer of the nesC language, the C dialect used to implement the TinyOS sensor network operating system, and its applications. He has a diploma in Computer Science from the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Lausanne and a Ph.D. from the University of California, Berkeley.

Edition details

• Publisher: Academic Press
• Publication date: 2014
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1493300881
• ISBN 13: 9781493300884
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 352