The mystery lecture notes

As long as written texts remain an important part of mathematics, we can expect that — every once in a while — boxes or bins will appear in a common room, or in a library, or outside some retiring professor’s office, with an enticing “Please take” or Servez-vous to encourage the random walker (or flâneur, or Spaziergänger) to pick up some old preprint or other. Thanks to such open-ended generosity, my own collection has been enriched by an old textbook I’ve already discussed, a fair number of Bourbaki Seminar reprints, and a few mimeographed reprints from André Weil’s own collection (also, a somewhat melancholy sight, an italian translation of his sister’s play Venise sauvée, or “Venice saved”), including lecture notes of Siegel, de Rham and papers of Serre and Ihara, with a few (unfortunately rather benign) marginal notes.

Monday last week, as I was at the University of Pennsylvania (to give a lecture in their Algebra and Galois Theory seminar — video accessible from Ted Chinburg’s web page…), I found a few such inviting bins in the common room. I quickly picked up what seems to be a very nice set of lecture notes (or survey?) of 3-manifold topology, dating apparently from the mid-seventies. In particular, it being typewritten (or xeroxed from a typewritten original), I grabbed it with especial promptness, thinking that this might well be a text that is not really available anywhere else.

However, I can’t quite confirm this because there is no indication of the author’s name, either at the beginning or at the end of the set of notes. Googling the first sentence (“The basic problem of manifold theory is that of classification”) didn’t bring any hit. But maybe some readers will recognize it? Here’s a picture of the first page, for all 3-detectives…