This account of basic manifold theory and global analysis, based on senior undergraduate and post-graduate courses at Glasgow University for students and researchers in theoretical physics, has been proven over many years. The treatment is rigorous yet less condensed than in books written primarily for pure mathematicians. Prerequisites include knowledge of basic linear algebra and topology. Topology is included in two appendices because many courses on mathematics for physics students do not include this subject.
Fractal Functions, Fractal Surfaces, and Wavelets is the first systematic exposition of the theory of fractal surfaces, a natural outgrowth of fractal sets and fractal functions. It is also the first treatment to bring these general considerations to bear on the burgeoning field of wavelets. The text is based on Massopusts work on and contributions to the theory of fractal functions, and the author uses a number of tools--including analysis, topology, algebra, and probability theory--to introduce readers to this new subject. Though much of the material presented in this book is relatively current (developed in the past decade by the author and his colleagues) and fairly specialized, an informative background is provided for those
The central idea of the lecture course which gave birth to this book was to define the homotopy groups of a space and then give all the machinery needed to prove in detail that the nth homotopy group of the sphere Sn, for n greater than or equal to 1 is isomorphic to the group of the integers, that the lower homotopy groups of Sn are trivial and that the third homotopy group of S2 is also isomorphic to the group of the integers. All this was achieved by discussing H-spaces and CoH-spaces, fibrations and cofibrations (rather thoroughly), simplicial structures and the homotopy groups of maps.Later, the book was expanded to introduce CW-complexes and their homotopy groups, to construct a special class of CW-complexes (the Eilenberg-Mac Lane spaces) and to include a chapter devoted to the study of the action of the fundamental group on the higher homotopy groups and the study of fibrations in the context of a category in which the fibres are forced to live; the final material of that chapter is a comparison of various kinds of universal fibrations. Completing the book are two appendices on compactly generated spaces and the theory of colimits. The book does not require any prior knowledge of Algebraic Topology and only rudimentary concepts of Category Theory are necessary; however, the student is supposed to be well at ease with the main general theorems of Topology and have a reasonable mathematical maturity.