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This page contains the information for a topology course I taught at the University of Birmingham during the 2012/2013 academic year. I taught the same course again in 2013 and 2014, but the material for those courses was published only in the internal online system of the university. This page is archived as it was at the end of the course.

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New: some solutions are available below.

Here is the material and information available for this course. Notice that I am not using WebCT for the moment; all of the material is here.

Course information - Program and syllabus

Course notes - Handouts

Errata: 1/4/2013: In Handout 9 there was a mistake in Definition 9.3: it should be “contains” rather than “equals”. (Corrected now). 4/4/2013: In Problem Sheet 4, Exercise 4.1, $f$ should be also surjective (corrected).

• Handout 10 (November 30th 2012)
• Handout 9 (November 27th 2012)
• Handout 8 (November 13th 2012)
• Handout 7 (November 2nd 2012)
• Handout 6 (October 26th 2012)
• Handout 5 (October 16th 2012)
• Handout 4 (October 12th 2012)
• Handout 3 (October 5th 2012)
• Handout 2 (October 2th 2012)
• Handout 1 (September 28th 2012)

Problem sheets

• Problem sheet 4 (December 4th 2012)
• Problem sheet 3 (November 20th 2012)
• Problem sheet 2 (October 23rd 2012)
• Problem sheet 1 (October 9th 2012)

Solutions to problem sheets

• Solutions to some marked exercises from Problem sheet 1 (April 1st 2013)
• Solutions to some marked exercises from Problem sheet 2 (April 2nd 2013)
• Solutions to some marked exercises from Problem sheet 3 (April 3rd 2013)
• Solutions to some marked exercises from Problem sheet 4 (April 4th 2013)

Fourth year tasks

The fourth year students taking MSM4P22 need to complete an additional task for the subject. Here are some details and suggestions for it.

Lecture rooms

Since there were more people registered for the class than expected, the original lecture room was not big enough to seat everyone. A new arrangement had to be made, and due to lack of space is was not possible to reserve the same room for every class. The conclusion is that lectures now take place in the following rooms:

• Tuesdays 1pm - 2pm at Watson Lecture Room B (there is class only in alternate weeks)
• Tuesdays 2pm - 3pm at Gisbert Kapp 225
• Fridays 4pm - 5pm at Nuffield G13

Continuous assessment

Since some people have told me they don’t find the way continuous assessment is evaluated very clear, here it is. Continuous assessment is worth 10% of the total module mark; since General Topology is half the module (the other half being Further Complex Variable), continuous assessment in General Topology is worth 5% of the total module mark.

In order to obtain the full mark you need to turn in a total of 12 problems before the last day of term (December 7th 2012.) If you turn in fewer of them you will get the corresponding proportion of the mark.

Which problems can you turn in? They are:

1. Any of the marked problems in the problem sheets. They indicate how much they are worth (usually 1 point, possibly more according to their difficulty.) You can give these to me any day up to, and including, December 7th 2012.
2. Any of the exercises in the handouts given in class. These are worth 1 point. You have to give these to me before I explain them in class. This will usually mean before the next class.
3. You can also get one point by explaining on the blackboard an unmarked problem in any of the problem sheets. Please tell me in advance if you would like to do one of them.

And of course, feel free to ask me about this if you have any doubts.