Notes on Basic 3-Manifold Topology

Sometime in the 1980's I started writing a book on 3-manifolds, but got sidetracked on the algebraic topology books described elsewhere on this website. The little that exists of the 3-manifolds book (see below for a table of contents) is rather crude and unpolished, and doesn't cover a lot of material, but it does contain a few things that may not be readily available elsewhere, like the elementary form of the Jaco-Shalen/Johannson torus decomposition theorem. So it seemed worthwhile to make this available electronically. However the reader should bear in mind that these pages are really just an early draft of the initial chapters of a real book on 3-manifolds, which I had originally hoped to write.

PDF file of the 2007 version (this is the current version). 72 pages.

Chapter 1. Canonical Decomposition

1. Prime Decomposition.

2. Torus Decomposition.

Chapter 2. Special Classes of 3-Manifolds

1. Seifert Manifolds.

2. Torus Bundles and Semi-Bundles.

Chapter 3. Homotopy Properties

1. The Loop and Sphere Theorems.

Just for the historical record, here is an earlier version from around the year 2000:

• Older version, singlepage
• Older version, doublepage