Sir Peter Swinnerton-Dyer's mathematical career encompasses more than 60 years' work of amazing creativity. This volume provides contemporary insight into several subjects in which Sir Peter's influence has been notable, and is dedicated to his 75th birthday. The opening section reviews some of his many remarkable contributions to mathematics and other fields. The remaining contributions come from leading researchers in analytic and arithmetic number theory, and algebraic geometry. The topics treated include: rational points on algebraic varieties, the Hasse principle, Shafarevich-Tate groups of elliptic curves and motives, Zagier's conjectures, descent and zero-cycles, Diophantine approximation, and Abelian and Fano varieties.

This independent account of modern ideas in differential geometry shows how they can be used to understand and extend classical results in integral geometry. The authors explore the influence of total curvature on the metric structure of complete, non-compact Riemannian 2-manifolds, although their work can be extended to more general spaces. Each chapter features open problems, making the volume a suitable learning aid for graduate students and non-specialists who seek an introduction to this modern area of differential geometry.

It is a pleasure to welcome you to the proceedings of the second International Castle Meeting on Coding Theory and its Applications, held at La Mota Castle in Medina del Campo. The event provided a forum for the exchange of results and ideas, which we hope will foster future collaboration. The ?rst meeting was held in 1999, and, encouraged by that experience, we now intend to hold the meeting every three years. Springer kindly accepted to publish the proceedings volume you have in your hands in their LNCS series. The topics were selected to cover some of the areas of research in Coding Theory that are currently receiving the most attention. The program consisted of a mixture of invited and submitted talks, with the focus on quality rather than quantity. A total of 34 papers were submitted to themeeting.Afteracarefulreviewprocessconductedbythescienti?ccommittee aided by external reviewers, we selected 14 of these for inclusion in the current volume, along with 5 invited papers. The program was further augmented by the remaining invited papers in addition to papers on recent results, printed in a separate volume. We would like to thank everyone who made this meeting possible by helping with the practical and scienti?c preparations: the organization committee, the scienti?c committee, the invited speakers, and the many external reviewers who shall remain anonymous. I would especially like to mention the General Advisor ofthe meeting, OyvindYtrehus.Finally Iextend mygratitudeto allthe authors and participants who contributed to this meeting."

Recent advances in computing and algorithms make it easier to do many classical problems in algebra. Suitable for graduate students, this book brings advanced algebra to life with many examples. The first three chapters provide an introduction to commutative algebra and connections to geometry. The remainder of the book focuses on three active areas of contemporary algebra: homological algebra; algebraic combinatorics and algebraic topology; and algebraic geometry.

The characterization of combinatorial or geometric structures in terms of their groups of automorphisms has attracted considerable interest in the last decades and is now commonly viewed as a natural generalization of Felix Klein's Erlangen program(1872).Inaddition,especiallyfor?nitestructures,importantapplications to practical topics such as design theory, coding theory and cryptography have made the ?eld even more attractive. The subject matter of this research monograph is the study and class- cation of ?ag-transitive Steiner designs, that is, combinatorial t-(v,k,1) designs which admit a group of automorphisms acting transitively on incident point-block pairs. As a consequence of the classi?cation of the ?nite simple groups, it has been possible in recent years to characterize Steiner t-designs, mainly for t=2,adm- ting groups of automorphisms with su?ciently strong symmetry properties. For Steiner 2-designs, arguably the most general results have been the classi?cation of all point 2-transitive Steiner 2-designs in 1985 by W. M. Kantor, and the almost complete determination of all ?ag-transitive Steiner 2-designs announced in 1990 byF.Buekenhout,A.Delandtsheer,J.Doyen,P.B.Kleidman,M.W.Liebeck, and J. Saxl. However, despite the classi?cation of the ?nite simple groups, for Steiner t-designs witht> 2 most of the characterizations of these types have remained long-standing challenging problems. Speci?cally, the determination of all ?- transitive Steiner t-designs with 3? t? 6 has been of particular interest and object of research for more than 40 years.

Recent advances in computing and algorithms make it easier to do many classical problems in algebra. Suitable for graduate students, this book brings advanced algebra to life with many examples. The first three chapters provide an introduction to commutative algebra and connections to geometry. The remainder of the book focuses on three active areas of contemporary algebra: homological algebra; algebraic combinatorics and algebraic topology; and algebraic geometry.

In this sequel to his award-winning How Mathematics Happened, physicist Peter S. Rudman explores the history of mathematics among the Babylonians and Egyptians, showing how their scribes in the era from 2000 to 1600 BCE used visualizations of how plane geometric figures could be partitioned into squares, rectangles, and right triangles to invent geometric algebra, even solving problems that we now do by quadratic algebra. Using illustrations adapted from both Babylonian cuneiform tablets and Egyptian hieroglyphic texts, Rudman traces the evolution of mathematics from the metric geometric algebra of Babylon and Egypt--which used numeric quantities on diagrams as a means to work out problems--to the nonmetric geometric algebra of Euclid (ca. 300 BCE). Thus, Rudman traces the evolution of calculations of square roots from Egypt and Babylon to India, and then to Pythagoras, Archimedes, and Ptolemy. Surprisingly, the best calculation was by a Babylonian scribe who calculated the square root of two to seven decimal-digit precision. Rudman provocatively asks, and then interestingly conjectures, why such a precise calculation was made in a mud-brick culture. From his analysis of Babylonian geometric algebra, Rudman formulates a "Babylonian Theorem," which he shows was used to derive the Pythagorean Theorem, about a millennium before its purported discovery by Pythagoras.
He also concludes that what enabled the Greek mathematicians to surpass their predecessors was the insertion of alphabetic notation onto geometric figures. Such symbolic notation was natural for users of an alphabetic language, but was impossible for the Babylonians and Egyptians, whose writing systems (cuneiform and hieroglyphics, respectively) were not alphabetic. Rudman intersperses his discussions of early math conundrums and solutions with "Fun Questions" for those who enjoy recreational math and wish to test their understanding. The Babylonian Theorem is a masterful, fascinating, and entertaining book, which will interest both math enthusiasts and students of history.

A q-clan with q a power of 2 is equivalent to a certain generalized quadrangle with a family of subquadrangles each associated with an oval in the Desarguesian plane of order 2. It is also equivalent to a flock of a quadratic cone, and hence to a line-spread of 3-dimensional projective space and thus to a translation plane, and more. These geometric objects are tied together by the so-called Fundamental Theorem of q-Clan Geometry. The book gives a complete proof of this theorem, followed by a detailed study of the known examples. The collineation groups of the associated generalized quadrangles and the stabilizers of their associated ovals are worked out completely.

In this monograph, we de?ne and investigate an algebro-geometric analogue of Donaldson invariants by using moduli spaces of semistable sheaves with arbitrary ranks on a polarized projective surface. We may expect the existence of interesting "universal relations among invariants", which would be a natural generalization of the "wall-crossing formula" and the "Witten conjecture" for classical Donaldson invariants. Our goal is to obtain a weaker version of such relations, in other brief words, to describe a relation as the sum of integrals over the products of m- uli spaces of objects with lower ranks. Fortunately, according to a recent excellent work of L. Gottsche, H. Nakajima and K. Yoshioka, [53], a wall-crossing formula for Donaldson invariants of projective surfaces can be deduced from such a weaker result in the rank two case. We hope that our work in this monograph would, at least tentatively, provides a part of foundation for the further study on such universal relations. In the rest of this preface, we would like to explain our motivation and some of important ingredients of this study. See Introduction for our actual problems and results. Donaldson Invariants Let us brie?y recall Donaldson invariants. We refer to [22] for more details and precise. We also refer to [37], [39], [51] and [53]. LetX be a compact simply con- ? nected oriented real 4-dimensional C -manifold with a Riemannian metric g. Let P be a principalSO(3)-bundle on X.

This book constitutes the thoroughly refereed post-conference proceedings of the Kyoto Conference on Computational Geometry and Graph Theory, KyotoCGGT 2007, held in Kyoto, Japan, in June 2007, in honor of Jin Akiyama and Vasek Chvatal, on the occasion of their 60th birthdays.

The 19 revised full papers, presented together with 5 invited papers, were carefully selected during two rounds of reviewing and improvement from more than 60 talks at the conference. All aspects of Computational Geometry and Graph Theory are covered, including tilings, polygons, impossible objects, coloring of graphs, Hamilton cycles, and factors of graphs.

This is a modern introduction to Kaehlerian geometry and Hodge structure. Coverage begins with variables, complex manifolds, holomorphic vector bundles, sheaves and cohomology theory (with the latter being treated in a more theoretical way than is usual in geometry). The book culminates with the Hodge decomposition theorem. In between, the author proves the Kaehler identities, which leads to the hard Lefschetz theorem and the Hodge index theorem. The second part of the book investigates the meaning of these results in several directions.

Rational homotopy is a very powerful tool for differential topology and geometry. This text aims to provide graduates and researchers with the tools necessary for the use of rational homotopy in geometry. Algebraic Models in Geometry has been written for topologists who are drawn to geometrical problems amenable to topological methods and also for geometers who are faced with problems requiring topological approaches and thus need a simple and concrete introduction to rational homotopy. This is essentially a book of applications. Geodesics, curvature, embeddings of manifolds, blow-ups, complex and Kahler manifolds, symplectic geometry, torus actions, configurations and arrangements are all covered. The chapters related to these subjects act as an introduction to the topic, a survey, and a guide to the literature. But no matter what the particular subject is, the central theme of the book persists; namely, there is a beautiful connection between geometry and rational homotopy which both serves to solve geometric problems and spur the development of topological methods.

This book presents the thoroughly refereed post-proceedings of the 5th International Workshop on Automated Deduction in Geometry, ADG 2004, held at Gainesville, FL, USA in September 2004.

The 12 revised full papers presented aurvey current issues theoretical and methodological topics as well as applications thereof - in particular automated geometry theorem proving, automated geometry problem solving, problems of dynamic geometry, and an object-oriented language for geometric objects.

This two volume work on Positivity in Algebraic Geometry contains a contemporary account of a body of work in complex algebraic geometry loosely centered around the theme of positivity. Topics in Volume I include ample line bundles and linear series on a projective variety, the classical theorems of Lefschetz and Bertini and their modern outgrowths, vanishing theorems, and local positivity. Volume II begins with a survey of positivity for vector bundles, and moves on to a systematic development of the theory of multiplier ideals and their applications. A good deal of this material has not previously appeared in book form, and substantial parts are worked out here in detail for the first time. At least a third of the book is devoted to concrete examples, applications, and pointers to further developments.

Volume I is more elementary than Volume II, and, for the most part, it can be read without access to Volume II.

This work treats an introduction to commutative ring theory and algebraic plane curves, requiring of the student only a basic knowledge of algebra, with all of the algebraic facts collected into several appendices that can be easily referred to, as needed. Kunz's proven conception of teaching topics in commutative algebra together with their applications to algebraic geometry makes this book significantly different from others on plane algebraic curves. The exposition focuses on the purely algebraic aspects of plane curve theory, leaving the topological and analytical viewpoints in the background, with only casual references to these subjects and suggestions for further reading. algebras, their graduated rings and Rees algebras, to deduce basic facts about the intersection theory of plane curves; presents residue theory in the affine plane and its applications to intersection theory; methods of proof for the Riemann-Roch theorem conform to the presentation of curve theory, formulated in the language of filtrations and associated graded rings; and examples, exercises, figures and suggestions for further study round out this fairly self-contained textbook.

One of the main achievements of algebraic geometry over the last 30 years is the work of Mori and others extending minimal models and the Enriques-Kodaira classification to 3-folds. This book, first published in 2000, is an integrated suite of papers centred around applications of Mori theory to birational geometry. Four of the papers (those by Pukhlikov, Fletcher, Corti, and the long joint paper Corti, Pukhlikov and Reid) work out in detail the theory of birational rigidity of Fano 3-folds; these contributions work for the first time with a representative class of Fano varieties, 3-fold hypersurfaces in weighted projective space, and include an attractive introductory treatment and a wealth of detailed computation of special cases.

Here is a deformation theory for degenerations of complex curves; specifically, discussing deformations which induce splitting of the singular fiber of a degeneration. The author constructs a deformation of the degeneration in such a way that a subdivisor is "barked," or peeled off from the singular fiber. "Barking deformations" are related to deformations of surface singularities, in particular, cyclic quotient singularities, as well as the mapping class groups of Riemann surfaces via monodromies.

Singularity theory is a broad subject with vague boundaries. It draws on many other areas of mathematics, and in turn has contributed to many areas both within and outside mathematics, in particular differential and algebraic geometry, knot theory, differential equations, bifurcation theory, Hamiltonian mechanics, optics, robotics and computer vision. This volume consists of two dozen articles from some of the best known figures in singularity theory, and it presents an up-to-date survey of research in this area.

The field of convex geometry has become a fertile subject of mathematical activity in the past few decades. This exposition, examining in detail those topics in convex geometry that are concerned with Euclidean space, is enriched by numerous examples, illustrations, and exercises, with a good bibliography and index.

The theory of intrinsic volumes for convex bodies, along with the Hadwiger characterization theorems, whose proofs are based on beautiful geometric ideas such as the rounding theorems and the Steiner formula, are treated in Part 1. In Part 2 the reader is given a survey on curvature and surface area measures and extensions of the class of convex bodies. Part 3 is devoted to the important class of star bodies and selectors for convex and star bodies, including a presentation of two famous problems of geometric tomography: the Shephard problem and the Busemanna "Petty problem.

Selected Topics in Convex Geometry requires of the reader only a basic knowledge of geometry, linear algebra, analysis, topology, and measure theory. The book can be used in the classroom setting for graduates courses or seminars in convex geometry, geometric and convex combinatorics, and convex analysis and optimization. Researchers in pure and applied areas will also benefit from the book.

Heegner points on both modular curves and elliptic curves over global fields of any characteristic form the topic of this research monograph. The Heegner module of an elliptic curve is an original concept introduced in this text. The computation of the cohomology of the Heegner module is the main technical result and is applied to prove the Tate conjecture for a class of elliptic surfaces over finite fields, this conjecture is equivalent to the Birch and Swinnerton-Dyer conjecture for the corresponding elliptic curves over global fields.

This ACM volume deals with tackling problems that can be represented by data structures which are essentially matrices with polynomial entries, mediated by the disciplines of commutative algebra and algebraic geometry. The discoveries stem from an interdisciplinary branch of research which has been growing steadily over the past decade. The author covers a wide range, from showing how to obtain deep heuristics in a computation of a ring, a module or a morphism, to developing means of solving nonlinear systems of equations - highlighting the use of advanced techniques to bring down the cost of computation. Although intended for advanced students and researchers with interests both in algebra and computation, many parts may be read by anyone with a basic abstract algebra course.

One of the major discoveries of the past two decades in algebraic geometry is the realization that the theory of minimal models of surfaces can be generalized to higher dimensional varieties. This generalization, called the minimal model program, or Mori's program, has developed into a powerful tool with applications to diverse questions in algebraic geometry and beyond. This book provides the first comprehensive introduction to the circle of ideas developed around the program, the prerequisites being only a basic knowledge of algebraic geometry. It will be of great interest to graduate students and researchers working in algebraic geometry and related fields.

The NATO Advanced Study Institute "Axiomatic, enriched and rna tivic homotopy theory" took place at the Isaac Newton Institute of Mathematical Sciences, Cambridge, England during 9-20 September 2002. The Directors were J.P.C.Greenlees and I.Zhukov; the other or ganizers were P.G.Goerss, F.Morel, J.F.Jardine and V.P.Snaith. The title describes the content well, and both the event and the contents of the present volume reflect recent remarkable successes in model categor ies, structured ring spectra and homotopy theory of algebraic geometry. The ASI took the form of a series of 15 minicourses and a few extra lectures, and was designed to provide background, and to bring the par ticipants up to date with developments. The present volume is based on a number of the lectures given during the workshop. The ASI was the opening workshop of the four month programme "New Contexts for Stable Homotopy Theory" which explored several themes in greater depth. I am grateful to the Isaac Newton Institute for providing such an ideal venue, the NATO Science Committee for their funding, and to all the speakers at the conference, whether or not they were able to contribute to the present volume. All contributions were refereed, and I thank the authors and referees for their efforts to fit in with the tight schedule. Finally, I would like to thank my coorganizers and all the staff at the Institute for making the ASI run so smoothly. J.P.C.GREENLEES."

The discovery of new algorithms for dealing with polynomial equations, and their implementation on fast, inexpensive computers, has revolutionized algebraic geometry and led to exciting new applications in the field. This book details many uses of algebraic geometry and highlights recent applications of Grobner bases and resultants. This edition contains two new sections, a new chapter, updated references and many minor improvements throughout.

Algebraic Geometry often seems very abstract, but in fact it is full of concrete examples and problems. This side of the subject can be approached through the equations of a variety, and the syzygies of these equations are a necessary part of the study. This book is the first textbook-level account of basic examples and techniques in this area. It illustrates the use of syzygies in many concrete geometric considerations, from interpolation to the study of canonical curves. The text has served as a basis for graduate courses by the author at Berkeley, Brandeis, and in Paris. It is also suitable for self-study by a reader who knows a little commutative algebra and algebraic geometry already. As an aid to the reader, the appendices provide summaries of local cohomology and commutative algebra, tying together examples and major results from a wide range of topics.