Algebraic Topology: An Introduction

William S. Massey Professor Massey, born in Illinois in 1920, received his bachelor's degree from the University of Chicago and then served for four years in the U.S. Navy during World War II. After the War he received his Ph.D. from Princeton University and spent two additional years there as a post-doctoral research assistant. He then taught for ten years on the faculty of Brown University, and moved to his present position at Yale in 1960. He is the author of numerous research articles on algebraic topology and related topics. This book developed from lecture notes of courses taught to Yale undergraduate and graduate students over a period of several years.

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This textbook is designed to introduce advanced undergraduate or beginning graduate students to algebraic topology as painlessly as possible. The principal topics treated are 2-dimensional manifolds, the fundamental group, and covering spaces, plus the group theory needed in these topics.