Book Description

'Analysis situs' is the name used by Poincaré when he was creating, at the end of the 19th century, the area of mathematics known today as topology. These lectures contain what is probably the first text where Poincaré's results and ideas were summarized, and an attempt to systematically present this difficult new area of mathematics was made. Of the two streams of topology existing at that time, point set topology and combinatorial topology, it is the latter to which this book is almost totally devoted. The first four chapters present, in detail, the notion and properties (introduced by Poincaré) of the incidence matrix of a cell decomposition of a manifold. The author's main goal is to show how to reproduce main topological invariants of a manifold and their relations in terms of the incidence matrix.