Early Work on Defect Driven Phase Transitions

This article summarizes the early history of the theory of phase transitions driven by topological defects, such as vortices in superfluid helium films or dislocations and disclinations in two-dimensional solids. We start with a review of our two earliest papers, pointing out their errors and omissions as well as their insights. We then describe the work, partly done by Kosterlitz but mostly done by other people, which corrected these oversights, and applied these ideas to experimental systems, and to numerical and experimental simulations.