No label defined (Q4023819)

In 1956 \textit{J. Milnor} published his famous paper on the existence of inequivalent differential structures on the topological 7-sphere. The following years were a period of rapid growth in the knowledge of the structure of smooth manifolds. \textit{S. Smale} showed that every differentiable manifold can be constructed by attaching handles in a most economic way, and he was able to prove the generalized Poincaré conjecture in higher dimensions. Using surgery methods the differential structures on spheres were completely classified. The present book is the first one presenting those results in a systematic way. The program of the book is best described by the author himself: ``Looking back at these developments it appears possible at present to single out certain main ideas and results and present them in a systematic and consolidated way... In a very broad way the content of this book can be described as the study of the topological structure of smooth manifolds.'' The first four chapters contain the foundations of differential topology, including differential equations on manifolds, immersions, embeddings and isotopies, collars, tubular neighbourhoods and transversality. Chapter V is on foliations and has no relation to the following chapters. Chapter VI deals with operations on manifolds, e.g. surgery and attaching handles. Chapter VII contains elementary cobordism, the handle presentation theorem, homology data, Morse inequalities and Poincaré duality. Chapter VIII deals with the implications as the higher dimensional Poincaré conjecture and others. Chapter IX is on framed manifolds. It deals with the Pontryagin construction and \(\pi\)- manifolds and almost parallelizable manifolds. Chapter X is on surgery. This is used for the computation of the groups \(\Theta^ n\) of \(n\)- dimensional homotopy spheres. There is an appendix on implicit functions, the theorem of Brown-Sard, the orthonormalization method and on homotopy groups of the orthogonal groups. Each chapter contains an introduction and historical remarks. The reader is expected to have some knowledge of algebraic topology and of the theory of vector bundles. The whole book is well organized and concisely and carefully written.