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Topology (from the Greek language words label=none, and label=none) is the part of mathematics concerned with the properties of a geometric object that are preserved under continuous deformations, such as Stretch factor, twisting, crumpling, and bending; that is, without closing holes, opening holes, tearing, gluing, or passing through itself.
A topological space is a set endowed with a structure, called a topology, which allows defining continuous deformation of subspaces, and, more generally, all kinds of continuity. , and, more generally, are examples of topological spaces, as any distance or metric defines a topology. The deformations that are considered in topology are and Homotopy. A property that is invariant under such deformations is a topological property. The following are basic examples of topological properties: the dimension, which allows distinguishing between a line and a surface; Compact space, which allows distinguishing between a line and a circle; connectedness, which allows distinguishing a circle from two non-intersecting circles.
The ideas underlying topology go back to Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, who in the 17th century envisioned the geometria situs and analysis situs. Leonhard Euler's Seven Bridges of Königsberg problem and polyhedron formula are arguably the field's first theorems. The term topology was introduced by Johann Benedict Listing in the 19th century; although, it was not until the first decades of the 20th century that the idea of a topological space was developed.
In one of the first papers in topology, Leonhard Euler demonstrated that it was impossible to find a route through the town of Königsberg (now Kaliningrad) that would cross each of its seven bridges exactly once. This result did not depend on the lengths of the bridges or on their distance from one another, but only on connectivity properties: which bridges connect to which islands or riverbanks. This Seven Bridges of Königsberg problem led to the branch of mathematics known as graph theory.
Similarly, the hairy ball theorem of algebraic topology says that "one cannot comb the hair flat on a hairy ball without creating a cowlick." This fact is immediately convincing to most people, even though they might not recognize the more formal statement of the theorem, that there is no nonvanishing continuous vector field on the sphere. As with the Bridges of Königsberg, the result does not depend on the shape of the sphere; it applies to any kind of smooth blob, as long as it has no holes.
To deal with these problems that do not rely on the exact shape of the objects, one must be clear about just what properties these problems do rely on. From this need arises the notion of homeomorphism. The impossibility of crossing each bridge just once applies to any arrangement of bridges homeomorphic to those in Königsberg, and the hairy ball theorem applies to any space homeomorphic to a sphere.
Intuitively, two spaces are homeomorphic if one can be deformed into the other without cutting or gluing. A traditional joke is that a topologist cannot distinguish a coffee mug from a doughnut, since a sufficiently pliable doughnut could be reshaped to a coffee cup by creating a dimple and progressively enlarging it, while shrinking the hole into a handle.
Homeomorphism can be considered the most basic Homeomorphism. Another is homotopy equivalence. This is harder to describe without getting technical, but the essential notion is that two objects are homotopy equivalent if they both result from "squishing" some larger object.
Further contributions were made by Augustin-Louis Cauchy, Ludwig Schläfli, Johann Benedict Listing, Bernhard Riemann and Enrico Betti.Richeson (2008) Listing introduced the term "Topologie" in Vorstudien zur Topologie, written in his native German, in 1847, having used the word for ten years in correspondence before its first appearance in print.Listing, Johann Benedict, "Vorstudien zur Topologie", Vandenhoeck und Ruprecht, Göttingen, p. 67, 1848 The English form "topology" was used in 1883 in Listing's obituary in the journal Nature to distinguish "qualitative geometry from the ordinary geometry in which quantitative relations chiefly are treated".
Their work was corrected, consolidated and greatly extended by Henri Poincaré. In 1895, he published his ground-breaking paper on Analysis Situs, which introduced the concepts now known as homotopy and homology, which are now considered part of algebraic topology.
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Unifying the work on function spaces of Georg Cantor, Vito Volterra, Cesare Arzelà, Jacques Hadamard, Giulio Ascoli and others, Maurice Fréchet introduced the metric space in 1906. A metric space is now considered a special case of a general topological space, with any given topological space potentially giving rise to many distinct metric spaces. In 1914, Felix Hausdorff coined the term "topological space" and gave the definition for what is now called a Hausdorff space.Hausdorff, Felix, "Grundzüge der Mengenlehre", Leipzig: Veit. In (Hausdorff Werke, II (2002), 91–576) Currently, a topological space is a slight generalization of Hausdorff spaces, given in 1922 by Kazimierz Kuratowski.
Modern topology depends strongly on the ideas of set theory, developed by Georg Cantor in the later part of the 19th century. In addition to establishing the basic ideas of set theory, Cantor considered point sets in Euclidean space as part of his study of Fourier series. For further developments, see point-set topology and algebraic topology.
The 2022 Abel Prize was awarded to Dennis Sullivan "for his groundbreaking contributions to topology in its broadest sense, and in particular its algebraic, geometric and dynamical aspects".
Formally, let be a set and let be a family of subsets of . Then is called a topology on if:
If is a topology on , then the pair is called a topological space. The notation may be used to denote a set endowed with the particular topology . By definition, every topology is a Pi-system.
The members of are called open sets in . A subset of is said to be closed if its complement is in (that is, its complement is open). A subset of may be open, closed, both (a clopen set), or neither. The empty set and itself are always both closed and open. An open subset of which contains a point is called a neighborhood of .
The basic object of study is topological spaces, which are sets equipped with a topology, that is, a family of , called open sets, which is closed under finite set intersection and (finite or infinite) set union. The fundamental concepts of topology, such as continuity, compactness, and connectedness, can be defined in terms of open sets. Intuitively, continuous functions take nearby points to nearby points. Compact sets are those that can be covered by finitely many sets of arbitrarily small size. Connected sets are sets that cannot be divided into two pieces that are far apart. The words nearby, arbitrarily small, and far apart can all be made precise by using open sets. Several topologies can be defined on a given space. Changing a topology consists of changing the collection of open sets. This changes which functions are continuous and which subsets are compact or connected.
are an important class of topological spaces where the distance between any two points is defined by a function called a metric. In a metric space, an open set is a union of open disks, where an open disk of radius centered at is the set of all points whose distance to is less than . Many common spaces are topological spaces whose topology can be defined by a metric. This is the case of the real line, the complex plane, real and complex and . Having a metric simplifies many proofs.
The most important of these invariants are , homology, and cohomology.
Although algebraic topology primarily uses algebra to study topological problems, using topology to solve algebraic problems is sometimes also possible. Algebraic topology, for example, allows for a convenient proof that any subgroup of a free group is again a free group.
More specifically, differential topology considers the properties and structures that require only a smooth structure on a manifold to be defined. Smooth manifolds are "softer" than manifolds with extra geometric structures, which can act as obstructions to certain types of equivalences and deformations that exist in differential topology. For instance, volume and Riemannian curvature are invariants that can distinguish different geometric structures on the same smooth manifoldthat is, one can smoothly "flatten out" certain manifolds, but it might require distorting the space and affecting the curvature or volume.
In high-dimensional topology, characteristic classes are a basic invariant, and surgery theory is a key theory.
Low-dimensional topology is strongly geometric, as reflected in the uniformization theorem in 2 dimensions – every surface admits a constant curvature metric; geometrically, it has one of 3 possible geometries: positive curvature/spherical, zero curvature/flat, and negative curvature/hyperbolic – and the geometrization conjecture (now theorem) in 3 dimensions – every 3-manifold can be cut into pieces, each of which has one of eight possible geometries.
2-dimensional topology can be studied as complex geometry in one variable (Bernhard Riemann surfaces are complex curves) – by the uniformization theorem every conformal class of metrics is equivalent to a unique complex one, and 4-dimensional topology can be studied from the point of view of complex geometry in two variables (complex surfaces), though not every 4-manifold admits a complex structure.
Several branches of programming language semantics, such as domain theory, are formalized using topology. In this context, Steve Vickers, building on work by Samson Abramsky and Michael B. Smyth, characterizes topological spaces as Boolean or over open sets, which are characterized as semidecidable (equivalently, finitely observable) properties.
The topological dependence of mechanical properties in solids is of interest in disciplines of mechanical engineering and materials science. Electrical and mechanical properties depend on the arrangement and network structures of molecules and elementary units in materials. The compressive strength of Crumpling topologies is studied in attempts to understand the high strength to weight of such structures that are mostly empty space. Topology is of further significance in Contact mechanics where the dependence of stiffness and friction on the dimensionality of surface structures is the subject of interest with applications in multi-body physics.
A topological quantum field theory (or topological field theory or TQFT) is a quantum field theory that computes topological invariants.
Although TQFTs were invented by physicists, they are also of mathematical interest, being related to, among other things, knot theory, the theory of in algebraic topology, and to the theory of moduli spaces in algebraic geometry. Simon Donaldson, Vaughan Jones, Edward Witten, and Maxim Kontsevich have all won for work related to topological field theory.
The topological classification of Calabi–Yau manifolds has important implications in string theory, as different manifolds can sustain different kinds of strings.Yau, S. & Nadis, S.; The Shape of Inner Space, Basic Books, 2010.
In cosmology, topology can be used to describe the overall shape of the universe. The Shape of Space: How to Visualize Surfaces and Three-dimensional Manifolds 2nd ed (Marcel Dekker, 1985, ) This area of research is commonly known as spacetime topology.
In condensed matter a relevant application to topological physics comes from the possibility to obtain one-way current, which is a current protected from backscattering. It was first discovered in electronics with the famous quantum Hall effect, and then generalized in other areas of physics, for instance in photonics by Duncan Haldane.
/a> The Figure Eight Puzzle, Science and Math, June 2012.
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