"The clarity of the author's thoughts and the carefulness of his exposition make reading this book a pleasure," noted the Bulletin of the American Mathematical Society upon the 1955 publication of John L. Kelley's General Topology. This comprehensive treatment for beginning graduate-level students immediately found a significant audience, and it remains a highly worthwhile and relevant book for students of topology and for professionals in many areas.
A systematic exposition of the part of general topology that has proven useful in several branches of mathematics, this volume is especially intended as background for modern analysis. An extensive preliminary chapter presents mathematical foundations for the main text. Subsequent chapters explore topological spaces, the Moore-Smith convergence, product and quotient spaces, embedding and metrization, and compact, uniform, and function spaces. Each chapter concludes with an abundance of problems, which form integral parts of the discussion as well as reinforcements and counter examples that mark the boundaries of possible theorems. The book concludes with an extensive index that provides supplementary material on elementary set theory.