Customer Reviews

An Introduction to Intersection Homology Theory, Second Edition

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3 star:		(1)
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This book is a very enjoyable survey of intersection (co)homology. It first introduces multiple (co)homology theories and states and/or proves the "de Rham" theorems for pairs of them. It then introduces "stratified spaces" and intersection (co)homology. There are lots of hands-on computations to look at, similar in flavor to the CW-complex problems from your algebraic topology class. There's some abstract derived category stuff with a few pages on Verdier duality. It also discusses Deligne's axiomatic characterization (within the derived category) of the intersection sheaf complex. There's lots of other stuff in it that I haven't read (despite the fact that it's only 200 pages).

HOWEVER, the number of typos is enormous. Most of them are obviously the fault of the publisher, not the authors (for instance, the letter 'f' replacing '...' in a filtration). It's really hard to read sometimes. Indices are screwed up or suppressed (which is pretty F%&*$ relevant when you're trying to learn what a perverse sheaf is...). Maybe they fixed these in a later printing, but you've been warned.

I actually wanted to give it 4 stars, but I felt that would reduce the impact of the typo complaint.

Edit: I just noticed that my tag of "perverse sheaves" refuses to show
up, even if I say "_perverse" or "-perverse" or whatever. What is
this, North Korea? There are objects in mathematics called "perverse
sheaves". The name is bad for a few reasons, but that's what they're
called. People need to be able to search for it. Other books have this phrase in their titles. What's the big deal? PERVERSE PERVERSE PERVERSE! You can buy pr0n on Amazon, so stop pretending.