Rafael Lopez – författare

This textbook offers a hands-on introduction to general topology, a fundamental tool in mathematics and its applications. It provides solid foundations for further study in mathematics in general, and topology in particular.

Aimed at undergraduate students in mathematics with no previous exposure to topology, the book presents key concepts in a mathematically rigorous yet accessible manner, illustrated by numerous examples. The essential feature of the book is the large sets of worked exercises at the end of each chapter. All of the basic topics are covered, namely, metric spaces, continuous maps, homeomorphisms, connectedness, and compactness. The book also explains the main constructions of new topological spaces such as product spaces and quotient spaces. The final chapter makes a foray into algebraic topology with the introduction of the fundamental group.

Thanks to nearly 300 solved exercises and abundant examples, Point-Set Topology is especially suitable for supplementing a first lecture course on topology for undergraduates, and it can also be utilized for independent study. The only prerequisites for reading the book are familiarity with mathematical proofs, some elements of set theory, and a good grasp of calculus.

The study of surfaces with constant mean curvature (CMC) is one of the main topics in classical differential geometry. Moreover, CMC surfaces are important mathematical models for the physics of interfaces in the absence of gravity, where they separate two different media or for capillary phenomena. Further, as most techniques used in the theory of CMC surfaces not only involve geometric methods but also PDE and complex analysis, the theory is also of great interest for many other mathematical fields.

While minimal surfaces and CMC surfaces in general have already been treated in the literature, the present work is the first to present a comprehensive study of “compact surfaces with boundaries,” narrowing its focus to a geometric view. Basic issues include the discussion whether the symmetries of the curve inherit to the surface; the possible values of the mean curvature, area and volume; stability; the circular boundary case and the existence of the Plateau problem in the non-parametric case. The exposition provides an outlook on recent research but also a set of techniques that allows the results to be expanded to other ambient spaces. Throughout the text, numerous illustrations clarify the results and their proofs.

The book is intended for graduate students and researchers in the field of differential geometry and especially theory of surfaces, including geometric analysis and geometric PDEs. It guides readers up to the state-of-the-art of the theory and introduces them to interesting open problems.