An Invitation to Morse Theory

This self-contained treatment of Morse Theory focuses on applications and is intended for a graduate course on differential or algebraic topology. The book is divided into three conceptually distinct parts. The first part contains the foundations of Morse theory (over the reals). The second part consists of applications of Morse theory over the reals, while the last part describes the basics and some applications of complex Morse theory, a.k.a. Picard-Lefschetz theory. This is the first textbook to include topics such as Morse-Smale flows, min- ...