Frontmatter -- Preface -- Contents -- Introduction -- Glossary -- Lecture 1. Heegaard splittings -- Lecture 2. Dehn surgery -- Lecture 3. Kirby calculus -- Lecture 4. Even surgeries -- Lecture 5. Review of 4-manifolds -- Lecture 6. Four-manifolds with boundary -- Lecture 7. Invariants of knots and links -- Lecture 8. Fibered knots -- Lecture 9. The Arf-invariant -- Lecture 10. Rohlin’s theorem -- Lecture 11. The Rohlin invariant -- Lecture 12. The Casson invariant -- Lecture 13. The group SU(2) -- Lecture 14. Representation spaces -- Lecture 15. The local properties of representation spaces -- Lecture 16. Casson’s invariant for Heegaard splittings -- Lecture 17. Casson’s invariant for knots -- Lecture 18. An application of the Casson invariant -- Lecture 19. The Casson invariant of Seifert manifolds -- Conclusion -- Exercises -- Bibliography -- Index