Stephan C. Carlson | Britannica

Stephan C. Carlson

Contributor

BIOGRAPHY

Professor of Mathematics, Rose-Hulman Institute of Technology, Terre Haute, Indiana. Author of Topology of Surfaces, Knots, and Manifolds: A First Undergraduate Course.

Primary Contributions (10)

Articles

Because both a doughnut and a coffee cup have one hole (handle), they can be mathematically, or topologically, transformed into one another without cutting them in any way. For this reason, it has often been joked that topologists cannot tell the difference between a coffee cup and a doughnut.

topology

Topology, branch of mathematics, sometimes referred to as “rubber sheet geometry,” in which two objects are considered equivalent if they can be continuously deformed into one another through such motions in space as bending, twisting, stretching, and shrinking while disallowing tearing apart or…

graph theory

Königsberg bridge problem

Brouwer’s fixed point theorem

Hausdorff space

Pappus’s theorem