On the Foundation of Algebraic Topology

Sammanfattning: In the 70:th, combinatorialists begun to systematically relate simplicial complexes and polynomial algebras, named Stanley-Reisner rings or face rings. This demanded an algebraization of the simplicial complexes, that turned the empty simplicial complex into a zero object w.r.t. to simplicial join, losing its former role as join-unit - a role taken over by a new (-1)-dimensional simplicial complex containing only the empty simplex.There can be no realization functor targeting the classical category of topological spaces that turns the contemporary simplicial join into topological join unless a (-1)-dimensional space is introduced as a topological join-unit. This algebraization of general topology enables a homology theory that unifies the classical relative and reduced homology functors and allows a Künneth Theorem for simplicial resp. topological pair-joins.