This directory provides a scanned Internet re-edition of the CIME course "TOPOLOGIA DIFFERENZIALE", held in Urbino (Pesaro, Italy) from July 2 to 12, 1962. Its Scientific Director was Professor E. VESENTINI of the University of Pisa. The lecturers and their (reasonably) current affiliations are Jean CERF (Univ. Paris-Sud, Orsay), André HAEFLIGER (U. de Genève), M.A. KERVAIRE (U. de Genève, obit 2008), S. SMALE (U. of California at Berkeley).
I am grateful to the present CIME Director Pietro Zecca, and likewise to the four authors, for providing the necessary permissions for this freely available Internet re-edition.
CIME (Centro Iternazionale Matematico Estivo) has an Internet site:
http://www.cime.unifi.it
http://web.math.unifi.it/users/cime/
The home URLs of this re-edition are (as of April 2009):
http://lsieben.perso.math.cnrs.fr/biblio/CIME_Urbino_1962/
http://lcs98.free.fr/biblio/CIME_Urbino_1962/
To facilitate wide use of this re-edition:
(i) Three formats are offered for each file: DjVu, PDF, and TIFF-G4.
(ii) Individual articles are provided as separate files, while the whole volume is additionally offered as a single file.
(iii) The PDF and DjVu formats offer search-select-copy features for text.
(iv) All files can (hopefully) be read with almost any equipment and operating systems of age up to ten years old.
(v) The on-screen image quality is comparable to the image quality of the original paper edition, or better.
Much scanned mathematics has appeared on Internet over the last decade. Nevertheless, few such re-editions enjoy most or all of the above desirable features. Perhaps this re-edition can serve in future as a 'benchmark'!
Further acknowlegements and technical notes:
(1) Elisabeth Kneller (Orsay librarian) kindly put a Ricoh digital scanner at my disposal.
(2) The public service robot http://any2DjVu.DjVuzone.org/ derived the DjVu files from TIFF-G4 files. Note that these DjVu files are over 4 times (!) more compact than the TIFF-G4 or PDF files, and are almost comparable in compactness to vectorial PDF files derived from TeX. Numerous pioneering examples of DjVu format for mathematics are found at http://www.numdam.org/ ; curiously, the above robot seems to give more compact resuts.
(3) The search-select-copy features in (iii) are currently uncommon in PDF files based on scanned mathematics, although they have been well known in similar DjVu files for many years. An (earliest?) exception is Pacific Journal's legacy archives, see http://projecteuclid.org. Andrew Ranicki (Edinburgh) quickly showed me they are possible for PDF version 1.6 using Adobe Acrobat 7.1 with its 'Paper Capture' plugin; but that nearly doubled the size of the PDF file. Then, using different technology, Michael Doob (U. Manitoba, Winnipeg) contributed the complete set of PDF formattings used here; these are quite remarkable in that: (a) they use only version 1.2 of PDF and hence work with versions 4 and higher of Adobe's free Reader, and (b) their search-select-copy features use much (by an order of magnitude!) less file space than the page images. Unfortunately, Michael's selection locations are not (yet) irreproachable.
(4) Selman Akbulut (MSU, E. Lansing), Fabrizio Catanese (U. Bayreuth), Andrew Ranicki (Edinburgh), and Claude Weber (U. Genève) provided logistic and moral support.
(5) For more discussion of techniques for electronic re-edition of mathematics, see the EMJ list archives at
http://listserv.albany.edu:8080/archives/emj.html
Readers who notice defects in this re-edition are urged to contact me.
Laurent Siebenmann, Paris, April 2009
Contact via email:
slc at math dot u-psud dot fr
laurent at math dot sunysb dot edu
(the last address is currently spam-free)