General Cohomology Theory and K-Theory

Book excerpt: These notes constitute a faithful record of a short course of lectures given in São Paulo, Brazil, in the summer of 1968. The audience was assumed to be familiar with the basic material of homology and homotopy theory, and the object of the course was to explain the methodology of general cohomology theory and to give applications of K-theory to familiar problems such as that of the existence of real division algebras. The audience was not assumed to be sophisticated in homological algebra, so one chapter is devoted to an elementary exposition of exact couples and spectral sequences.