General Information

Dear Visitor,

The 24th Summer Conference on Topology and Its Applications was held in Brno, Czech Republic, July 14-17, 2009. The Conference was hosted by the Faculty of Electrical Engineering and Communication, Brno University of Technology on the occasion of the 50-th anniversary of the foundation of the Faculty and the 110-th anniversary of the foundation of the University. The conference venue included also some facilities of the Faculty of Business and Management. The researchers from all topology-related areas of mathematics, computer science, physics and other sciences were cordially invited to participate in any of our 8 sessions. For more information, please refer to the program section.

The conference was organized with the support of the Statutory City of Brno, the South Moravian Region and the Brno University of Technology.

What’s New

We recommend to the participants to visit our Download Page, where some additional materials for the Conference are available for downloading, including the Conference Photo, some photographs from some social events, the electronic version of the booklet of Abstracts and more. The video records of the keynote lectures will be available soon. Please keep in touch and visit also our Actual Info page and fill our anonymous Questionnaire.

Roots of the Brno Topological Studies Tradition

Jan Chvalina

First, let us mention a very important fact: in 1959 a notable book was published written by Professor Eduard Čech, one of the greatest Czech mathematicians. Entitled Topologické prostory (Topological Spaces), it was written in Czech and arose from Professor Čech's seminar on topology held in Brno from May 1936 to November 1939. By this time, the Czech universities had been closed down by the Nazis. It is to be noted that Professor Čech started his intensive investigations in general as well as combinatorial (algebraic) topology as early as 1931. He also attended a conference in Moscow where his results received extraordinary attention. During the three years of the above-mentioned seminar, twenty-six papers were published, one of which being the well-known Čech’s paper, On Bicompact Spaces, Annals of Mathematics, 38, 1937, 823-844. An important classical concept is the Stone-Čech compactification. In algebraic topology, Čech achieved remarkable results on the homology and co-homology theory in general topological spaces and structures, today called Čechs homology and co-homology groups. Among other distinguished members of the seminar were also Bedřich Pospíšil, Josef Novák, Karel Koutský, and Miloš Neubauer.

Note that the basic structure - a topological space - defined by Eduard Čech in 1937 - is defined as a pair (P, u), where P is a set and the closure operation u should satisfy only the following three axioms:

(i) (ii) and (iii)

This concept was then further investigated by other mathematicians not only in Czechoslovakia.

Topological activities continued in Brno for many more years with the results obtained published in distinguished mathematical journals and presented at international topological conferences, particularly at the famous Prague Topological Symposia founded in the erly sixties. The Brno topological tradition was later continued by other mathematicians such as František Šik, Milan Sekanina, Ladislav Skula and Jiří Rosický.