History of topology

Mathematicians associate the emergence of topology as a distinct field of mathematics with the 1895 publication of Analysis Situs by the Frenchman Henri Poincaré, although many topological ideas had found their way into mathematics during the previous century and a half. The Latin phrase analysis situs may be translated as “analysis of position” and is similar to the phrase geometria situs, meaning “geometry of position,” used in 1735 by the Swiss mathematician Leonhard Euler to describe his solution to the Königsberg bridge problem. Euler’s work on this problem also is cited as the beginning of graph theory, the study of networks of vertices connected by edges, which shares many ideas with topology.

During the 19th century two distinct movements developed that would ultimately produce the sibling specializations of algebraic topology and general topology. The first was characterized by attempts to understand the topological aspects of surfacelike objects that arise by combining elementary shapes, such as polygons or polyhedra. One early contributor to combinatorial topology, as this subject was eventually called, was the German mathematician Johann Listing, who published Vorstudien zur Topologie (1847; “Introductory Studies in Topology”), which is often cited as the first print occurrence of the term topology. In 1851 the German mathematician Bernhard Riemann considered surfaces related to complex number theory and, hence, utilized combinatorial topology as a tool for analyzing functions. The German geometers August Möbius and Felix Klein published works on “one-sided” surfaces in 1858 and 1882, respectively. Möbius’s example, now known as the Möbius strip, may be constructed by gluing together the ends of a long rectangular strip of paper that has been given a half twist. Surfaces containing subsets homeomorphic to the Möbius strip are called nonorientable surfaces and play an important role in the classification of two-dimensional surfaces. Klein provided an example of a one-sided surface that is closed, that is, without any one-dimensional boundaries. This example, now called the Klein bottle, cannot exist in three-dimensional space without intersecting itself and, thus, was of interest to mathematicians who previously had considered surfaces only in three-dimensional space.

Work by many mathematicians, including the four mentioned above, preceded the 1895 publication of Analysis Situs, in which Poincaré established a basic context for using algebraic ideas in combinatorial topology. Combinatorial topology continued to be developed, especially by the German-born American mathematician Max Dehn and the Danish mathematician Poul Heegaard, who jointly presented one of the first classification theorems for two-dimensional surfaces in 1907. Soon thereafter the importance of associating algebraic structures with topological objects was clearly established by, for example, the Dutch mathematician L.E.J. Brouwer and his fixed point theorem. Although the phrase algebraic topology was first used somewhat later in 1936 by the Russian-born American mathematician Solomon Lefschetz, research in this major area of topology was well under way much earlier in the 20th century.

Simultaneous with the early development of combinatorial topology, 19th-century analysts, such as the French mathematician Augustin Cauchy and the German mathematician Karl Weierstrass, investigated Fourier series, in which sequences of functions converged to other functions in a sense similar to convergence of sequences of points in space. From another point of view, mathematicians such as the German Georg Cantor and the French Émile Borel studied the relationship between Fourier series and set theory. Two initiatives arose from these efforts: establishing a rigorous mathematical setting for major problems of analysis and providing a general setting for mathematical ideas related to convergence of sequences. In 1899 the German mathematician David Hilbert proposed an axiomatic setting for general geometry beyond what the ancient Greeks had considered. In 1905 the French mathematician Maurice Fréchet proposed a consistent scheme of axioms for convergence in an abstract set and also axioms for a metric space, which is a set supplied with a distance function (or “metric”). In 1910 Hilbert suggested axioms for neighbourhoods of points in an abstract set, thereby generalizing properties of small disks centred at points in the plane. Finally, the German mathematician Felix Hausdorff in his Grundzüge der Mengenlehre (1914; “Elements of Set Theory”) proposed the foundational axiomatic relationships among the metric, limit, and neighbourhood approaches for general spaces (see Hausdorff space). Although it was not until 1925 that the Russian mathematician Pavel Alexandrov introduced the modern axioms for a topology on an abstract set, the field of general topology was born in Hausdorff’s work.

During the period up to the 1960s, research in the field of general topology flourished and settled many important questions. The notion of dimension and its meaning for general topological spaces was satisfactorily addressed with the introduction of an inductive theory of dimension. Compactness, a property that generalizes closed and bounded subsets of n-dimensional Euclidean space, was successfully extended to topological spaces through a definition involving “covers” of a space by collections of open sets, and many problems involving compactness were solved during this period. The metrization problem, which sought a topological description of the spaces for which the topology could be induced by a metric, was settled following considerable work on the notion of paracompactness, a property that generalizes compactness.

Since the 1960s, research in general topology has moved into several new areas that involve intricate mathematical tools, including set theoretic methods. In the late 1960s researchers worked to generalize some of the topological properties of infinite-dimensional Hilbert space. These efforts foreshadowed a new area of topology now referred to as infinite-dimensional topology. Another major area of modern interest is set theoretic topology, in which the connection between topological spaces and notions from set theory and logic is studied. Some of the problems in this area involve topological propositions that are independent of and yet consistent with the usually assumed axioms of set theory (see the Click Here to see full-size tabletable). The resulting arguments, referred to as forcing theory, have yielded provisional truth of some major longstanding topological conjectures.