Questions tagged [topology]
Questions involving topology, the mathematical study of properties of spaces preserved by continuous maps.
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Who was the first person to prove the invariance of the Euler characteristic under triangulations?
Given a compact orientable surface $S$ and any triangulation where $F$ denotes the amount of triangles, $E$ denotes the amount of edges, and $V$ denotes the amount of vertices, we know that the Euler-...
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48 views
How did Dyck originally state and prove his theorem in topology about the connected sum of a torus and projective plane?
Dyck's theorem in topology is sometimes stated as follows: the connected sum of a torus and projective plane is homeomorphic to the connected sum of three projective planes.
Certainly, this is the ...
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40 views
Who extended the Banach fixed point theorem from the context of normed spaces to the context of metric spaces?
It is well known that Banach's fixed-point theorem was initially conceived as a fixed-point theorem
for applications defined in normed spaces (see [1]).
This theorem was conceived in 1922 by Stefan ...
2
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1answer
59 views
Who is the John Thomas of “Thomas's Plank” and “Thomas's Corkscrew”?
Entries $93$ and $94$ in Steen and Seebach's "Counterexamples in Topology" are named "Thomas's Plank" and "Thomas's Corkscrew". These are apparently named for a certain &...
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3answers
166 views
Historical ways of *presenting* or axiomatizing the notion of a topological space
I've heard rumors in a couple of places that the modern presentation of a topology as $(X, \tau)$ where $X$ is our topological space and $\tau$ is our set of open sets is "somewhat" new and ...
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0answers
70 views
Development of the Idea of Homeomorphism?
How did the historical development of the notion of homeomorphism take place?
At first, I think the most important thing to study were continuous functions and metric structures.
When did the focus of ...
6
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1answer
128 views
What is the source of Hermann Weyl's remark about “near-sighted policemen” with respect to compact spaces?
Hermann Weyl is widely reported as making the following observation about a compact space:
"If a city is compact, it can be guarded by a finite number of arbitrarily near-sighted policemen."
...
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0answers
74 views
Who first called the Brouwer Fixed Point Theorem “the crumpled paper theorem”?
Wikipedia attributes the remark to Brouwer himself, but I am extremely skeptical. Their citation goes to a webpage of a ? French educational TV show, where the remark appears to be a fictionalized ...
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77 views
Who invented the push-pull construction?
I learned about the push-pull construction from a video lecture by Freedman in which it is explained starting around 39:08. It is somewhat long and technical to describe in detail, but the main idea ...
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1answer
108 views
Normed vector space : when and who?
When does the concept of "normed vector space" emerge?
Who is the first mathematician to consider this setting?
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2answers
692 views
On the history of Haar measure
Haar measure is a well-known concept in measure theory.
Many books are perfectly dedicated to present its existence and uniqueness such as measure theory for D. Cohn.
I am looking for a good ...
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98 views
What if Newton's bucket had been a sphere?
My question is about Newton's bucket experiment. If a sphere filled (say) one-third with water is rotated very very fast, will the water eventually spread out across and coat the entire interior ...
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2answers
154 views
Material on the History of Mathematical Spaces
First and foremost, I am aware that a similar question has been asked here and has been touched upon elsewhere. I have found these discussions very compelling but a bit light on external reference, ...
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2answers
352 views
History of various definitions of topology
I have been reading Point Set Topology for a while, and turns out that there are various possible ways to define a topology. Most popular one is using open set axioms. Another one is using closure ...
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3answers
147 views
Which book covers topology historically?
Is there a book, which expresses all the questions, or searches for attainment of certain utility/need, or thing, which gave the discovery or invention of all the components of Topology?
I need book ...
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101 views
Were the ancient Greeks aware of the “topology” of (Euclidean) space?
Related to a more mathematically inclined question, I'd like to ask the following question:
The ancient Greeks made use of infinite arguments and processes (limits), e.g. in the method of exhaustion ...
2
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1answer
274 views
Several questions about Gauss's mathematical conception of braids
I'm trying to figure out several things about Gauss's thoughts concerning a certain four-strand braid. The reference my questions are based on is mainly Moritz Epple's excellent article "orbits ...
6
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1answer
204 views
Origin of Compactness
According to Wikipedia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pavel_Urysohn, Urysohn and Alexandrov first formulated the modern definition of compactness. In which paper did they do this? Is there an English ...
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2answers
262 views
Who first described the fundamental group as the group of deck transformations?
Grothendieck developed the theory of the fundamental group of a scheme in SGA 1. In order to do so he used the fact that the fundamental group of a topological space is isomorphic to the group of deck ...
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89 views
History of Braids
I am looking for papers or books that describe the history of the development of braid theory, mainly during the 19th and the 20th century. I know Moritz Epple book on the history of the theory of ...
4
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1answer
194 views
Motivation of Continuous Functions
What is the historical motivation of continuous functions? Also, does anyone know who first isolated the idea?
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4answers
792 views
Who was the first individual that used the word “torus” to refer to $\mathbb{S}^{1} \times \mathbb{S}^{1}$?
Further, I believe that the idea to call it thus had to do with its resemblance to the "torus" in the base of some Greek columns of old:
What do you think of this hypothesis of mine?
Thanks in ...
8
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2answers
274 views
(Co)Homology: From topology to the rest of mathematics?
I can appreciate how (co)homology arose in the context of topology/geometry. Trying to get a handle on the handles of spaces leads one to this idea. It's not obvious, but I can see how this would lead ...
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0answers
177 views
Set Theory, onto and into their relation to spoken language definitions
Does anyone know how the definitions for onto and into map to the spoken language definitions of the words? I compared the Bourbaki definitions to these words and have a suspicion that the German ...
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2answers
331 views
What topological ideas did Gauss introduce to his student Möbius?
Recently I found a website with good historical information about the contributions of Gauss to Analysis situs (the old term for topology). The site is in German so I made a Google translate to ...
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2answers
382 views
Basic Theorems in Topology: Who proved them first?
Little thinking into basic Real Analysis results like
Arbitrary union of open sets is open
made me wonder who could have possibly proved it first - do we have any historic data on it?
Also, who ...
2
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1answer
183 views
Who was Puppe of the Puppe sequence?
I have had difficulty locating the full name and story of the mathematician Puppe whose name adorns the beloved underlying long-exact sequence algebraic topology is built on. Does anyone know who they ...
6
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2answers
238 views
What exactly did Poincaré mean by 'simply connected'?
I've been reading John Stillwell's translation of the famous Analysis Situs and have become confused about the exact meaning of 'simply connected' in Poincaré's language. On page 7 (in the ...
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85 views
Riemann surfaces and covering
Assuming we have a Riemann surface $S$ of degree $n$ and we look at it as a covering of the projective line $\mathbb{P}^1$. If $B$ is the set of branch points of $S$ (when $B$ is a subset in $\mathbb{...
2
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1answer
122 views
Material models of Riemann surfaces
It is known that during the last quarter of the 19th century there was a flourishing of the production of material models (from plaster, strings, card-board etc) of curves and surfaces in Germany (but ...
11
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1answer
279 views
A knot cannot be tied in 4-dimensions, but when was this conjectured and proven?
Today it has been shown that a 1-dimensional object in 4-dimensional space cannot be tied into a knot.
But I would like to know who first conjectured this and when? And when was it proven?
(P.S., is ...
7
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1answer
405 views
Who first proved the “Cantor-Heine theorem” on uniform continuity?
The theorem is that any continuous function on a compact is uniformly continuous.
It is called "Heine", and sometimes also "Heine-Cantor" theorem.
My question is: what is the contribution of Cantor ...
5
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1answer
144 views
Origins and history of branched covering
During my research on branched coverings of the projective plane, I am interested to know the origins and history of branched coverings of the projective plane and the projective line, together with ...
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2answers
208 views
why was the hairy ball theorem important
In Topology courses one learns
An even dimensional sphere does not possess any continuous field of unit vectors
What is the importance of this result? I can't think of any applications off the top ...
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0answers
206 views
Why is the space of sections of $E$ called $\Gamma(E)$?
The space of sections of a bundle $\pi: E \to B$ is commonly denoted $\Gamma(E)$. (Note that the graph of a function $f$ is $\Gamma(f):=\left\{(x,f(x))\right\}$, and a particular section $\sigma: B \...
2
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2answers
148 views
Separability and second countability is the same thing to Halmos
I was browsing through Paul Halmos' classic book on measure theory from 1950, when I came by the following definition of separability on page 3 in the chapter on prerequisites:
Today a separable ...
7
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0answers
189 views
Who discovered the singular cup product?
Cohomology is a stronger invariant than homology because it can be equipped with a ring structure. To be precise, if one starts with the singular cohomology groups $H^\bullet(-; R)$ with coefficients ...
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1answer
399 views
Who discovered the topological proof of Nielsen-Schreier theorem?
The celebrated Nielsen-Schreier theorem in group theory says subgroup of a free group is free. This was proved for finitely generated subgroups of free groups by Jakob Nielsen in 1921, which involved ...
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1answer
364 views
History of covering spaces
I want to know what lead to the notion of covering spaces, and the evolution of the concept. I understand that topology was not developed to solve problems, but to gain insight into the foundation of ...
2
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1answer
165 views
History of open cover compactness definition
I have been looking into the history of topology. One thing I am very curious about is the history of the open cover definition of compactness. According to Raman-Sundström, this goes back to a lemma ...
5
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1answer
356 views
Injection of Bernoulli numbers into topology
The Bernoulli numbers appear in the Harer-Zagier formula enumerating gluings of polygons, the Kervaire-Milnor formula for the order of homotopy groups for n-spheres, and (with the connection to the ...
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1answer
159 views
questions about definition of topology [closed]
Do we have any information about definition of topology . Definition is not intuitive for me .Please share information about definition of topology .
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1answer
460 views
What caused the name change from “analysis situs” to “topology”?
J. Alexander's 1926 paper, Combinatorial Analysis Situs, doesn't refer to the field as combinatorial topology.
He mentions that combinatorial analysis situs is concerned with topological invariants ...
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2answers
408 views
Did Gauss formulate, or at least know of, the full essence of the Gauss-Bonnet Theorem?
I know that a special case of the Bonnet theorem, called the Theorema Elegantissimum, was proved by Gauss in his 1827 treatise on differential geometry. This was a theorem that dealt with the ...
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1answer
887 views
How did Poincaré discover the fundamental group?
How did Poincare discover the fundamental group? What was the first instance that led Poincaré to discover this amazing theory?
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3answers
4k views
Who created topology, and when, and what problems led to this creation?
Who created topology, when did that happen, and how was it discovered?
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1answer
418 views
What specific problems motivated Poincaré's work on topology?
The McTutor biography on Poincaré says:
Poincaré's Analysis situs, published in 1895, is an early systematic treatment of topology. He can be said to have been the originator of algebraic topology ...
12
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2answers
414 views
What examples led to the modern definition of a topological space?
Today the language of topological spaces via open sets is fundamental in many different areas of mathematics, and it is a bit mysterious that the same formalism successfully captures such a wide ...
