The website for my MASS course, “Winding Around” (Math 497C, Fall 2013) is now live.

“Winding Around” is an introduction to topology using the winding number as a unifying theme. It’s intended to be different from most introductory topology courses because we’ll try to define the key concept (winding number) as economically as possible and then  apply it in many different ways.

One of the inspirations for this course is the classic expository paper

Atiyah, M. F. “Algebraic Topology and Elliptic Operators.” Communications on Pure and Applied Mathematics 20, no. 2 (1967): 237–249. doi:10.1002/cpa.3160200202.

and if things go according to plan I hope that we may get to discuss the Bott periodicity theorem at the end of the course, in the spirit of Atiyah’s article.