The main purpose of part I of these notes is to develop for a ring R a functional notion of R-completion of a space X. For R=Zp and X subject to usual finiteness condition, the R-completion coincides up to homotopy, with the p-profinite completion of Quillen and Sullivan; for R a subring of the rationals, the R-completion coincides up to homotopy, with the localizations of Quillen, Sullivan and others. In part II of these notes, the authors have assembled some results on towers of fibrations, cosimplicial spaces and homotopy limits which were needed in the discussions of part I, but which are of some interest in themselves.

viii homology groups. A weaker result, sufficient nevertheless for our purposes, is proved in Chapter 5, where the reader will also find some discussion of the need for a more powerful in variance theorem and a summary of the proof of such a theorem. Secondly the emphasis in this book is on low-dimensional examples the graphs and surfaces of the title since it is there that geometrical intuition has its roots. The goal of the book is the investigation in Chapter 9 of the properties of graphs in surfaces; some of the problems studied there are mentioned briefly in the Introduction, which contains an in formal survey of the material of the book. Many of the results of Chapter 9 do indeed generalize to higher dimensions (and the general machinery of simplicial homology theory is avai1able from earlier chapters) but I have confined myself to one example, namely the theorem that non-orientable closed surfaces do not embed in three-dimensional space. One of the principal results of Chapter 9, a version of Lefschetz duality, certainly generalizes, but for an effective presentation such a gener- ization needs cohomology theory. Apart from a brief mention in connexion with Kirchhoff's laws for an electrical network I do not use any cohomology here. Thirdly there are a number of digressions, whose purpose is rather to illuminate the central argument from a slight dis tance, than to contribute materially to its exposition."

University of Aarhus, 50. Anniversary, 11 September 1978