Surgery theory. Foundations. With Contributions by Diarmuid Crowley (Q6540567)

Surgery, being related to bordism theory, has been a tool in manifold theory for some time. It gained prominence with Milnor's construction of exotic spheres. There are two early books on the subject by \textit{W. Browder} [Surgery on simply-connected manifolds. Berlin-Heidelberg-New York: Springer-Verlag (1972; Zbl 0239.57016)] and \textit{C. T. C. Wall} [Surgery on compact manifolds. London-New York: Academic Press (1970; Zbl 0219.57024)]. By the mid sixties the project of classifying manifolds flourished. Wall had developed surgery into a powerful machine, and applied it successfully. As a leader in the field, Wall described the theory and he presented much of the research going on at the time. It is not a text book, but a service to the research community. Wall's book will remain the primary resource on the topic of surgery.\N\NSurgery has matured. It is applied in many more settings. Surgery on topological manifolds is better understood. There is an algebraic theory and there is equivariant surgery. There are controlled theories, and much more.\N\NThe book by W. Lück and T. Macko tries to present the theory so that surgery becomes accessible to a broader audience. As background material there is a chapter on the \(s\)-cobordism theorem, which is the only result that tells us when two manifolds are diffeomorphic (or equivalent in some other category). It is followed by a chapter on Whitehead torsion, that also covers Reidemeister torsion and the classification of lens spaces. Thereafter the authors cover Poincaré duality and Spivak normal structures. By now one may define normal maps, the objects surgery is applied to. The authors describe in detail how the geometric information provides the algebraic obstruction which tells us whether we can complete the surgery problem successfully, and convert the normal map into a simple homotopy equivalence (or equivalence in the category under consideration). Specifics depend on the parity of the dimension.\N\NThereafter the authors turn their attention to more conceptual and geometric aspects of the theory. They cover the surgery long exact sequence, due to Browder, Novikov, Rothenberg, Sullivan, Wall and the \(\pi - \pi\) theorem. Milnor's classification of exotic spheres is reworked with these methods. After a chapter with preliminary material, the authors give an account of Ranicki's algebraic surgery theory.\N\NUnder the heading computations of \(L\)-groups the focus is the Farrell-Jones conjecture, and less in major contributions by C.T.C. Wall, A. Bak and A. Dress. There is some material on the homotopy type of the spaces \(G/TOP\), \(G/PL\), and \(G/O\), as well as the structure sets of fake and actual lens spaces, real and projective spaces, products of spheres and other prominent closed manifolds.\N\NIt is nice that so much about surgery is collected in one volume. The book brings together topics that are scattered over the literature, and sometimes difficult to find. Even the experienced reader may find something new. The extensive bibliography is great to have.