Principles of Topology

by Fred H. Croom

Book Overview

Topology is a natural, geometric, and intuitively appealing branch of mathematics that can be understood and appreciated by students as they begin their study of advanced mathematical topics. Designed... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0030128137
• ISBN13: 9780030128134
• Release Date: January 1989
• Publisher: Saunders College Publishing
• Length: 312 Pages
• Weight: 1.10 lbs.

Customer Reviews

Good "Hand-holding" Intro to Topology

I'm an adult, self-study student, with a background in calculus, physics. I've now gone through several books on topology, and I find that even many of the undergraduate texts tend to be a bit "dense," in that they introduce too much, too fast. Croom's textbook takes a very step-by-step, hand-holding approach to introducing topology, focusing on concrete examples, yet still having a reasonable amount of rigor. (Of nine chapters, he doesn't even formally get to topology until Chapter 4. The first three chapters are a general intro, open and closed sets, and metric spaces.) The last chapter offers a basic introduction to algebraic topology. This is an excellent book for self-study, and also good for undergraduates with a physics or engineering orientation who want to get the intuitive principles, and also some sense for the formal math. Students (including undergrads) who are really strong on abstract math might benefit from the more intensive and detailed treatments found in other texts; but even they might find Croom's book useful to fall back on when they get stuck on some basic concept. Croom includes historical discussions of the foundations of topology, which is also helpful. He also includes a glossary of mathematical symbols up front, which is very helpful for trying to keep track of all the new notations involved. There are lots of solved problems, and also problems for students to work out, although solutions for those would be helpful in some future edition.

In print again

I really like this book for a first course in topology. It has the right level and balance of subjects. The book has been very hard to find for a number of years but has now been republished by Thomson Learning in Singapore. The new ISBN is 981-243-288-4.

Great Undergraduate text in Topology

I was very disappointed to see that this text is out of print. I would like to use this text for our topology topics course at USAFA. It pitches the subject at just the right level for the beginner in topolgy! Fabulous First Text! Does anyone know how I could get my hands on about 30 copies. OR know of one similar to this text which is still in print?

Very good for beginners.

As many math educators agree, there are many textbooks not written for beginners. This textbook is outstanding for any level of beginner. I wish it can be picked up by Dover. I highly recommend it to any reader who wants to know the subject: Topology.

Good basic text for point set topology

I taught a one semester course on basic point set topology out of this book. The emphasis in the first half is on metric spaces, which provide the most natural class of examples for the basic principles of point set topology that any student taking a course in topology must know about. There is little extraneous material, and I found that the students thought the book was very good. This was a group of students at a regional campus of a large state university, and I would recommend the book for a beginning course at a comparable campus. Those teaching at research institutions will want more.