Does anyone have a reference to actual computational applications of Algebraic Topology?<p>These notes contain the definition of various chain complexes and groups (co-homology/homotopy) that are in-principle computable. However, I have not seen this being efficiently applied somewhere, and not been able to come up with interesting applications myself. Topics I have considered are:<p>1. Triangulation of solutions of equations (for e.g. homology computations) does not seem to be very popular, at least in dimension >3. I suspect this is a hard problem, but maybe I am just missing pointers to the right literature.<p>2. CAD applications or Computer Games have lot's of triangulated objects. Their topology seems to be not to be very interesting. Again: In dimension <=3 there is really not that much going on. And since you have constructed the object yourself, you probably know the geometry already.<p>3. Graphs appear everywhere, and can be viewed as 1-dimensional chain complexes but do not have interesting co-homology groups.<p>4. Did anyone compute homology groups for "Manifold Learning"?<p>It's also not clear to me, how much interesting information can be extracted from those homology groups. Applications of Homotopy/Homology in (semi-classical) Physics are already quite slim (apart from Quantum Field Theory, String Theory, Gauge Theory?!) as most of it takes place in contractible spaces $IR^n$.