The Mathematical Legacy of Eduard Cech

This book commemorates the 100th anniversary of the birth of Eduard Cech (1893 - 1960), the man who, together with G. Fubini, founded modern projective differential geometry. In the field of general topology he proved (concurrently with M. H. Stone, but independently) the existence of a maximal compactification and introduced for a fairly general class of topological spaces two kinds of dimension, now frequently called the Brouwer-Cech and the Cech-Lebesgue dimension.

In algebraic topology, he was one of the founders of the homology theory for arbitrary topological spaces. Compiled here are Cech's most important papers on topology and geometry, as well as a selection of works by Cech's followers. The influence he was to have on fellow and future mathematicians is manifest in these latter papers which develop theories originally put forth by Cech, and which obtain new results in the course of solving problems posed in Cech's papers.