Customer Reviews

An Introduction to Homological Algebra

5 star:		(1)
4 star:		(0)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

This book was first published in 1960. It is one of the first few to appear that treated a very abstract subject matter but whose applications are numerous (number thepory, algebraic geometry, topology, group theory, ring theory, etc.). It took a couple of decades to see the full potential of homological algebra.

Author is a very good writer; theorems are clearly stated and most of them proved. The author has another text called A First Course of Homological Algebra, which I think is a bit better and a bit more modern.
Nonetheless, this is a valuable text, even today, after more than 40 years of its first appearance.

This book may be one of the worst written texts I've seen
on a very difficult abstraction of algebra and topology.
I don't have a real desire to read it further
but I'm getting an idea of the subject
( not a lot of thanks to the way it was written).
I went online and read Mathworld definitions for some of the terms and that helped.
I don't know if there is any application to this besides maybe some number theory ones that are almost as abstract.
If you took a course where this was the text, I can only say,
I'm very sorry.
How Mathematics managed to get this far removed from reality is hard to say?
It is ironic that the son of Eli Cartan who is the creator of some of the most useful algebra/ group theory
should be the sponsor of this homological algebra.
With no problems and no examples there is no way to get context for a student , much less understanding.
Avoid books by this author like the plague!
He's still writing and may have improved some, but anyone who published this has to be really numb.
There really should be a zero stars for books like this one.