This set of notes Is derived from a seminar given
at the University of Michigan in 1973, and portions of the
author's doctoral thesis. It is intended to give a reasonably
complete and self-contained account of surgery theory modulo
a set of primes.
The first three chapters contain the background
material necessary to describe the theory. Chapter 1 is mainly
definitions and notation and contains no new ideas, with the
exception of relative localization and colocalization of
spaces. Included is a sketch of the immersion classification
theorem of Hirsch and Haefliger-Poenaru.
Chapter 2 contains the theory of local Whitehead
torsion. The definition differs from the one given by Cappell
and Shaneson, but is justified by a Whitehead-type local
collapse-expansion theorem. Chapter 3 discusses the theory
of spaces which satisfy Poincare duality with coefficients
in a ring, including the construction of a local Spivak normal
fibration. Normal invariants modulo a set of primes are
described and the homotopy groups of the classifying space
Gp/H are computed.