British Topology Home Page

This site is intended to act as a convenient source of pointers to Topology-related sites, including archives and conference announcements. It is not intended to be part of a British archive as such, but pointers to useful sites will be included to form a `nonlocalised’ archive. Although intended mainly for British and general European use, it will include references to other parts of the world. To have items included, either email them to me or (preferably) send addresses of existing web documents. Conference notices and other items with a finite lifetime will normally be removed when the advertised events have occurred.

Please let me know of any errors or links that you would like to see included. I would be grateful for comments on the structure and contents of this site. Anyone wishing to set up and maintain a subsidiary page of this site is encouraged to do so.

The British Topology web pages were originally created by Andrew Baker. They are now maintained by Thomas Huettemann.

Some comments by Frank Adams

All his writings are enlivened by witty remarks that he also used as a lecturer to keep the attention of his audience. Some of these remarks have become classics, like his description of a spectral sequence, one of the machineries of algebraic topology to compute invariants by a complicated iterative algebraic procedure:

  • “an Elizabethan drama, full of action, in which the business of each character is to kill at least one other character, so that at the end of the play one has the stage strewn with corpses and only one actor left alive (namely the one to speak the last few lines).”

In case the machinery of algebraic topology ever seemed too daunting, he would comfort the reader with the words

  • “let us be glad we don’t work in algebraic geometry.”

(Updated 2019-07-30)

Mathematical Sciences Research Centre