Following Quillen's approach to complex cobordism, the authors introduce the notion of oriented cohomology theory on the category of smooth varieties over a fixed field. They prove the existence of a universal such theory (in characteristic 0) called Algebraic Cobordism. The book also contains some examples of computations and applications.

Providing a systematic introduction to differential characters as introduced by Cheeger and Simons, this text describes important concepts such as fiber integration, higher dimensional holonomy, transgression, and the product structure in a geometric manner. Differential characters form a model of what is nowadays called differential cohomology, which is the mathematical structure behind the higher gauge theories in physics.

Metric and Differential Geometry grew out of a similarly named conference held at Chern Institute of Mathematics, Tianjin and Capital Normal University, Beijing. The various contributions to this volume cover a broad range of topics in metric and differential geometry, including metric spaces, Ricci flow, Einstein manifolds, Kahler geometry, index theory, hypoelliptic Laplacian and analytic torsion. It offers the most recent advances as well as surveys the new developments. Contributors: M.T. Anderson J.-M. Bismut X. Chen X. Dai R. Harvey P. Koskela B. Lawson X. Ma R. Melrose W. Muller A. Naor J. Simons C. Sormani D. Sullivan S. Sun G. Tian K. Wildrick W. Zhang

A NATO Advanced Study Institute entitled "Algebraic K-theory: Connections with Geometry and Topology" was held at the Chateau Lake Louise, Lake Louise, Alberta, Canada from December 7 to December 11 of 1987. This meeting was jointly supported by NATO and the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada, and was sponsored in part by the Canadian Mathematical Society. This book is the volume of proceedings for that meeting. Algebraic K-theory is essentially the study of homotopy invariants arising from rings and their associated matrix groups. More importantly perhaps, the subject has become central to the study of the relationship between Topology, Algebraic Geometry and Number Theory. It draws on all of these fields as a subject in its own right, but it serves as well as an effective translator for the application of concepts from one field in another. The papers in this volume are representative of the current state of the subject. They are, for the most part, research papers which are primarily of interest to researchers in the field and to those aspiring to be such. There is a section on problems in this volume which should be of particular interest to students; it contains a discussion of the problems from Gersten's well-known list of 1973, as well as a short list of new problems.

The dual space of a locally compact group G consists of the equivalence classes of irreducible unitary representations of G. This book provides a comprehensive guide to the theory of induced representations and explains its use in describing the dual spaces for important classes of groups. It introduces various induction constructions and proves the core theorems on induced representations, including the fundamental imprimitivity theorem of Mackey and Blattner. An extensive introduction to Mackey analysis is applied to compute dual spaces for a wide variety of examples. Fell's contributions to understanding the natural topology on the dual are also presented. In the final two chapters, the theory is applied in a variety of settings including topological Frobenius properties and continuous wavelet transforms. This book will be useful to graduate students seeking to enter the area as well as experts who need the theory of unitary group representations in their research.

At the heart of the topology of global optimization lies Morse Theory: The study of the behaviour of lower level sets of functions as the level varies. Roughly speaking, the topology of lower level sets only may change when passing a level which corresponds to a stationary point (or Karush-Kuhn Tucker point). We study elements of Morse Theory, both in the unconstrained and constrained case. Special attention is paid to the degree of differentiabil ity of the functions under consideration. The reader will become motivated to discuss the possible shapes and forms of functions that may possibly arise within a given problem framework. In a separate chapter we show how certain ideas may be carried over to nonsmooth items, such as problems of Chebyshev approximation type. We made this choice in order to show that a good under standing of regular smooth problems may lead to a straightforward treatment of "just" continuous problems by means of suitable perturbation techniques, taking a priori nonsmoothness into account. Moreover, we make a focal point analysis in order to emphasize the difference between inner product norms and, for example, the maximum norm. Then, specific tools from algebraic topol ogy, in particular homology theory, are treated in some detail. However, this development is carried out only as far as it is needed to understand the relation between critical points of a function on a manifold with structured boundary. Then, we pay attention to three important subjects in nonlinear optimization.

Tamari lattices originated from weakenings or reinterpretations of the familar associativity law. This has been the subject of Dov Tamari's thesis at the Sorbonne in Paris in 1951 and the central theme of his subsequent mathematical work. Tamari lattices can be realized in terms of polytopes called associahedra, which in fact also appeared first in Tamari's thesis. By now these beautiful structures have made their appearance in many different areas of pure and applied mathematics, such as algebra, combinatorics, computer science, category theory, geometry, topology, and also in physics. Their interdisciplinary nature provides much fascination and value. On the occasion of Dov Tamari's centennial birthday, this book provides an introduction to topical research related to Tamari's work and ideas. Most of the articles collected in it are written in a way accessible to a wide audience of students and researchers in mathematics and mathematical physics and are accompanied by high quality illustrations.

This self-contained text is an excellent introduction to Lie groups and their actions on manifolds. The authors start with an elementary discussion of matrix groups, followed by chapters devoted to the basic structure and representation theory of finite dimensinal Lie algebras. They then turn to global issues, demonstrating the key issue of the interplay between differential geometry and Lie theory. Special emphasis is placed on homogeneous spaces and invariant geometric structures. The last section of the book is dedicated to the structure theory of Lie groups. Particularly, they focus on maximal compact subgroups, dense subgroups, complex structures, and linearity. This text is accessible to a broad range of mathematicians and graduate students; it will be useful both as a graduate textbook and as a research reference.

The conjugate operator method is a powerful recently developed technique for studying spectral properties of self-adjoint operators. One of the purposes of this volume is to present a refinement of the original method due to Mourre leading to essentially optimal results in situations as varied as ordinary differential operators, pseudo-differential operators and N-body Schroedinger hamiltonians. Another topic is a new algebraic framework for the N-body problem allowing a simple and systematic treatment of large classes of many-channel hamiltonians. The monograph will be of interest to research mathematicians and mathematical physicists. The authors have made efforts to produce an essentially self-contained text, which makes it accessible to advanced students. Thus about one third of the book is devoted to the development of tools from functional analysis, in particular real interpolation theory for Banach spaces and functional calculus and Besov spaces associated with multi-parameter C0-groups. Certainly this monograph (containing a bibliography of 170 items) is a well-written contribution to this field which is suitable to stimulate further evolution of the theory. (Mathematical Reviews)

It is not often that one gets to write a preface to a collection of one's own papers. The most urgent task is to thank the people who made this book possible. That means first of all Hy Bass who, on behalf of Springer-Verlag, approached me about the idea. The late Walter Kaufmann-Biihler was very encouraging; Paulo Ribenboim helped in an important way; and Ina Lindemann saw the project through with tact and skill that I deeply appreciate. My wishes have been indulged in two ways. First, I was allowed to follow up each selected paper with an afterthought. Back in my student days I became aware of the Gesammelte Mathematische Werke of Dedekind, edited by Fricke, Noether, and Ore. I was impressed by the editors' notes that followed most of the papers and found them very usefuL A more direct model was furnished by the collected papers of Lars Ahlfors, in which the author himself supplied afterthoughts for each paper or group of papers. These were tough acts to follow, but I hope that some readers will find at least some of my afterthoughts interesting. Second, I was permitted to add eight previously unpublished items. My model here, to a certain extent, was the charming little book, A Mathematician's Miscel lany by J. E. Littlewood. In picking these eight I had quite a selection to make -from fourteen loose-leaf notebooks of such writings. Here again I hope that at least some will be found to be of interest.

This completely revised and corrected version of the well-known Florence notes circulated by the authors together with E. Friedlander examines basic topology, emphasizing homotopy theory. Included is a discussion of Postnikov towers and rational homotopy theory. This is then followed by an in-depth look at differential forms and de Tham's theorem on simplicial complexes. In addition, Sullivan's results on computing the rational homotopy type from forms is presented. New to the Second Edition: *Fully-revised appendices including an expanded discussion of the Hirsch lemma *Presentation of a natural proof of a Serre spectral sequence result *Updated content throughout the book, reflecting advances in the area of homotopy theory With its modern approach and timely revisions, this second edition of Rational Homotopy Theory and Differential Forms will be a valuable resource for graduate students and researchers in algebraic topology, differential forms, and homotopy theory.

Few books on the subject of Riemann surfaces cover the relatively modern theory of dessins d'enfants (children's drawings), which was launched by Grothendieck in the 1980s and is now an active field of research. In this 2011 book, the authors begin with an elementary account of the theory of compact Riemann surfaces viewed as algebraic curves and as quotients of the hyperbolic plane by the action of Fuchsian groups of finite type. They then use this knowledge to introduce the reader to the theory of dessins d'enfants and its connection with algebraic curves defined over number fields. A large number of worked examples are provided to aid understanding, so no experience beyond the undergraduate level is required. Readers without any previous knowledge of the field of dessins d'enfants are taken rapidly to the forefront of current research.

The algebraic techniques developed by Kakde will almost certainly lead eventually to major progress in the study of congruences between automorphic forms and the main conjectures of non-commutative Iwasawa theory for many motives. Non-commutative Iwasawa theory has emerged dramatically over the last decade, culminating in the recent proof of the non-commutative main conjecture for the Tate motive over a totally real p-adic Lie extension of a number field, independently by Ritter and Weiss on the one hand, and Kakde on the other. The initial ideas for giving a precise formulation of the non-commutative main conjecture were discovered by Venjakob, and were then systematically developed in the subsequent papers by Coates-Fukaya-Kato-Sujatha-Venjakob and Fukaya-Kato. There was also parallel related work in this direction by Burns and Flach on the equivariant Tamagawa number conjecture. Subsequently, Kato discovered an important idea for studying the K_1 groups of non-abelian Iwasawa algebras in terms of the K_1 groups of the abelian quotients of these Iwasawa algebras. Kakde's proof is a beautiful development of these ideas of Kato, combined with an idea of Burns, and essentially reduces the study of the non-abelian main conjectures to abelian ones. The approach of Ritter and Weiss is more classical, and partly inspired by techniques of Frohlich and Taylor. Since many of the ideas in this book should eventually be applicable to other motives, one of its major aims is to provide a self-contained exposition of some of the main general themes underlying these developments. The present volume will be a valuable resource for researchers working in both Iwasawa theory and the theory of automorphic forms.

Jean Leray (1906-1998) was one of the great French mathematicians of his century. His life's workcan be dividedinto 3 major areas, reflected in these 3 volumes. Volume I, to which an Introduction has been contributed by A. Borel, covers Leray's seminal work in algebraic topology, where he created sheaf theory and discovered the spectral sequences. Volume II, with an introduction by P. Lax, covers fluid mechanics and partial differential equations. Leray demonstrated the existence of the infinite-time extension of weak solutions of the Navier-Stokes equations; 60 years later this profound work has retained all its impact. Volume III, on the theory of several complex variables, has a long introduction by G. Henkin. Leray's work on the ramified Cauchy problem will stand for centuries alongside the Cauchy-Kovalevska theorem for the unramified case.

He was awarded the Malaxa Prize (1938), the Grand Prix in Mathematical Sciences (1940), the Feltrinelli Prize (1971), the Wolf Prize in Mathematics (1979), and the Lomonosov Gold Medal (1988)."

Graphs on Surfaces: Dualities, Polynomials, and Knots offers an accessible and comprehensive treatment of recent developments on generalized duals of graphs on surfaces, and their applications. The authors illustrate the interdependency between duality, medial graphs and knots; how this interdependency is reflected in algebraic invariants of graphs and knots; and how it can be exploited to solve problems in graph and knot theory. Taking a constructive approach, the authors emphasize how generalized duals and related ideas arise by localizing classical constructions, such as geometric duals and Tait graphs, and then removing artificial restrictions in these constructions to obtain full extensions of them to embedded graphs. The authors demonstrate the benefits of these generalizations to embedded graphs in chapters describing their applications to graph polynomials and knots. Graphs on Surfaces: Dualities, Polynomials, and Knots also provides a self-contained introduction to graphs on surfaces, generalized duals, topological graph polynomials, and knot polynomials that is accessible both to graph theorists and to knot theorists. Directed at those with some familiarity with basic graph theory and knot theory, this book is appropriate for graduate students and researchers in either area. Because the area is advancing so rapidly, the authors give a comprehensive overview of the topic and include a robust bibliography, aiming to provide the reader with the necessary foundations to stay abreast of the field. The reader will come away from the text convinced of advantages of considering these higher genus analogues of constructions of plane and abstract graphs, and with a good understanding of how they arise.

In recognition of professor Shiing-Shen Chern's long and distinguished service to mathematics and to the University of California, the geometers at Berkeley held an International Symposium in Global Analysis and Global Geometry in his honor in June 1979. The output of this Symposium was published in a series of three separate volumes, comprising approximately a third of Professor Chern's total publications up to 1979. Later, a fourth volume was published, focusing on papers written during the Eighties. This third volume comprises selected papers written between 1965 and 1979.

In many areas of mathematics some "higher operations" are arising. These havebecome so important that several research projects refer to such expressions. Higher operationsform new types of algebras. The key to understanding and comparing them, to creating invariants of their action is operad theory. This is a point of view that is 40 years old in algebraic topology, but the new trend is its appearance in several other areas, such as algebraic geometry, mathematical physics, differential geometry, and combinatorics. The present volume is the first comprehensive and systematic approach to algebraic operads. An operad is an algebraic device that serves to study all kinds of algebras (associative, commutative, Lie, Poisson, A-infinity, etc.) from a conceptual point of view. The book presents this topic with an emphasis on Koszul duality theory. After a modern treatment of Koszul duality for associative algebras, the theory is extended to operads. Applications to homotopy algebra are given, for instance the Homotopy Transfer Theorem. Although the necessary notions of algebra are recalled, readers are expected to be familiar with elementary homological algebra. Each chapter ends with a helpful summary and exercises. A full chapter is devoted to examples, and numerous figures are included. After a low-level chapter on Algebra, accessible to (advanced) undergraduate students, the level increases gradually through the book. However, the authors have done their best to make it suitable for graduate students: three appendices review the basic results needed in order to understand the various chapters. Since higher algebra is becoming essential in several research areas like deformation theory, algebraic geometry, representation theory, differential geometry, algebraic combinatorics, and mathematical physics, the book can also be used as a reference work by researchers.

This book, addressing both researchers and graduate students, reviews equivariant localization techniques for the evaluation of Feynman path integrals. The author gives the relevant mathematical background in some detail, showing at the same time how localization ideas are related to classical integrability. The text explores the symmetries inherent in localizable models for assessing the applicability of localization formulae. Various applications from physics and mathematics are presented.

Since most of the problems arising in science and engineering are nonlinear, they are inherently difficult to solve. Traditional analytical approximations are valid only for weakly nonlinear problems and often fail when used for problems with strong nonlinearity. Nonlinear Flow Phenomena and Homotopy Analysis: Fluid Flow and Heat Transfer presents the current theoretical developments of the analytical method of homotopy analysis. This book not only addresses the theoretical framework for the method, but also gives a number of examples of nonlinear problems that have been solved by means of the homotopy analysis method. The particular focus lies on fluid flow problems governed by nonlinear differential equations. This book is intended for researchers in applied mathematics, physics, mechanics and engineering.

Both Kuppalapalle Vajravelu and Robert A. Van Gorder work at the University of Central Florida, USA."

Just suppose, for a moment, that all rings of integers in algebraic number fields were unique factorization domains, then it would be fairly easy to produce a proof of Fermat's Last Theorem, fitting, say, in the margin of this page. Unfortunately however, rings of integers are not that nice in general, so that, for centuries, math ematicians had to search for alternative proofs, a quest which culminated finally in Wiles' marvelous results - but this is history. The fact remains that modern algebraic number theory really started off with in vestigating the problem which rings of integers actually are unique factorization domains. The best approach to this question is, of course, through the general the ory of Dedekind rings, using the full power of their class group, whose vanishing is, by its very definition, equivalent to the unique factorization property. Using the fact that a Dedekind ring is essentially just a one-dimensional global version of discrete valuation rings, one easily verifies that the class group of a Dedekind ring coincides with its Picard group, thus making it into a nice, functorial invariant, which may be studied and calculated through algebraic, geometric and co homological methods. In view of the success of the use of the class group within the framework of Dedekind rings, one may wonder whether it may be applied in other contexts as well. However, for more general rings, even the definition of the class group itself causes problems."

The book consists of articles at the frontier of current research in Algebraic Topology. It presents recent results by top notch experts, and is intended primarily for researchers and graduate students working in the field of algebraic topology. Included is an important article by Cohen, Johnes and Yan on the homology of the space of smooth loops on a manifold M, endowed with the Chas-Sullivan intersection product, as well as an article by Goerss, Henn and Mahowald on stable homotopy groups of spheres, which uses the cutting edge technology of "topological modular forms."

Plurisubharmonic functions playa major role in the theory of functions of several complex variables. The extensiveness of plurisubharmonic functions, the simplicity of their definition together with the richness of their properties and. most importantly, their close connection with holomorphic functions have assured plurisubharmonic functions a lasting place in multidimensional complex analysis. (Pluri)subharmonic functions first made their appearance in the works of Hartogs at the beginning of the century. They figure in an essential way, for example, in the proof of the famous theorem of Hartogs (1906) on joint holomorphicity. Defined at first on the complex plane IC, the class of subharmonic functions became thereafter one of the most fundamental tools in the investigation of analytic functions of one or several variables. The theory of subharmonic functions was developed and generalized in various directions: subharmonic functions in Euclidean space IRn, plurisubharmonic functions in complex space en and others. Subharmonic functions and the foundations ofthe associated classical poten tial theory are sufficiently well exposed in the literature, and so we introduce here only a few fundamental results which we require. More detailed expositions can be found in the monographs of Privalov (1937), Brelot (1961), and Landkof (1966). See also Brelot (1972), where a history of the development of the theory of subharmonic functions is given."

Rational homotopy theory is a subfield of algebraic topology. Written by three authorities in the field, this book contains all the main theorems of the field with complete proofs. As both notation and techniques of rational homotopy theory have been considerably simplified, the book presents modern elementary proofs for many results that were proven ten or fifteen years ago.