Application of the concepts and methods of topology and geometry have led to a deeper understanding of many crucial aspects in condensed matter physics, cosmology, gravity and particle physics. This book can be considered an advanced textbook on modern applications and recent developments in these fields of physical research. Written as a set of largely self-contained extensive lectures, the book gives an introduction to topological concepts in gauge theories, BRST quantization, chiral anomalies, sypersymmetric solitons and noncommutative geometry. It will be of benefit to postgraduate students, educating newcomers to the field and lecturers looking for advanced material.

This monograph is mostly devoted to the problem of the geome- trizing of Lagrangians which depend on higher order accelerations. It naturally prolongs the theme of the monograph "The Geometry of La- grange spaces: Theory and Applications", written together with M. Anastasiei and published by Kluwer Academic Publishers in 1994. The existence of Lagrangians of order k > 1 has been contemplated by mechanicists and physicists for a long time. Einstein had grasped their presence in connection with the Brownian motion. They are also present in relativistic theories based on metrics which depend on speeds and accelerations of particles or in the Hamiltonian formulation of non- linear systems given by Korteweg-de Vries equations. There resulted from here the methods to be adopted in their theoretical treatment. One is based on the variational problem involving the integral action of the Lagrangian. A second one is derived from the axioms of Analytical Mechanics involving the Poincare-Cartan forms. The geometrical methods based on the study of the geometries of higher order could invigorate the whole theory. This is the way adopted by us in defining and studying the Lagrange spaces of higher order. The problems raised by the geometrization of Lagrangians of order k > 1 investigated by many scholars: Ch. Ehresmann, P. Libermann, J. Pommaret; J.T. Synge, M. Crampin, P. Saunders; G.S. Asanov, P.Aringazin; I. Kolar, D. Krupka; M. de Leon, W. Sarlet, P. Cantrjin, H. Rund, W.M. Tulczyjew, A. Kawaguchi, K. Yano, K. Kondo, D.

Methods from contact and symplectic geometry can be used to solve highly non-trivial nonlinear partial and ordinary differential equations without resorting to approximate numerical methods or algebraic computing software. This book explains how it's done. It combines the clarity and accessibility of an advanced textbook with the completeness of an encyclopedia. The basic ideas that Lie and Cartan developed at the end of the nineteenth century to transform solving a differential equation into a problem in geometry or algebra are here reworked in a novel and modern way. Differential equations are considered as a part of contact and symplectic geometry, so that all the machinery of Hodge-deRham calculus can be applied. In this way a wide class of equations can be tackled, including quasi-linear equations and Monge-Ampere equations (which play an important role in modern theoretical physics and meteorology).

The central theme of this book is the restoration of Poincare duality on stratified singular spaces by using Verdier-self-dual sheaves such as the prototypical intersection chain sheaf on a complex variety. Highlights include complete and detailed proofs of decomposition theorems for self-dual sheaves, explanation of methods for computing twisted characteristic classes and an introduction to the author's theory of non-Witt spaces and Lagrangian structures."

In the three decades since the introduction of the Kobayashi distance, the subject of hyperbolic complex spaces and holomorphic mappings has grown to be a big industry. This book gives a comprehensive and systematic account on the Carath odory and Kobayashi distances, hyperbolic complex spaces and holomorphic mappings with geometric methods. A very complete list of references should be useful for prospective researchers in this area.

A collection of five surveys on dynamical systems, indispensable for graduate students and researchers in mathematics and theoretical physics. Written in the modern language of differential geometry, the book covers all the new differential geometric and Lie-algebraic methods currently used in the theory of integrable systems.

This book is written for theoretical and mathematical physicists and mat- maticians interested in recent developments in complex general relativity and their application to classical and quantum gravity. Calculations are presented by paying attention to those details normally omitted in research papers, for pedagogical r- sons. Familiarity with fibre-bundle theory is certainly helpful, but in many cases I only rely on two-spinor calculus and conformally invariant concepts in gravitational physics. The key concepts the book is devoted to are complex manifolds, spinor techniques, conformal gravity, ?-planes, ?-surfaces, Penrose transform, complex 3 1 - - space-time models with non-vanishing torsion, spin- fields and spin- potentials. 2 2 Problems have been inserted at the end, to help the reader to check his und- standing of these topics. Thus, I can find at least four reasons for writing yet another book on spinor and twistor methods in general relativity: (i) to write a textbook useful to - ginning graduate students and research workers, where two-component spinor c- culus is the unifying mathematical language.

This volume is devoted to the "hyperbolic theory" of dynamical systems (DS), that is, the theory of smooth DS's with hyperbolic behaviour of the tra jectories (generally speaking, not the individual trajectories, but trajectories filling out more or less "significant" subsets in the phase space. Hyperbolicity the property that under a small displacement of any of a trajectory consists in point of it to one side of the trajectory, the change with time of the relative positions of the original and displaced points resulting from the action of the DS is reminiscent of the mot ion next to a saddle. If there are "sufficiently many" such trajectories and the phase space is compact, then although they "tend to diverge from one another" as it were, they "have nowhere to go" and their behaviour acquires a complicated intricate character. (In the physical literature one often talks about "chaos" in such situations. ) This type of be haviour would appear to be the opposite of the more customary and simple type of behaviour characterized by its own kind of stability and regularity of the motions (these words are for the moment not being used as a strict ter 1 minology but rather as descriptive informal terms). The ergodic properties of DS's with hyperbolic behaviour of trajectories (Bunimovich et al. 1985) have already been considered in Volume 2 of this series. In this volume we therefore consider mainly the properties of a topological character (see below 2 for further details)."

The discoveries of the last decades have opened new perspectives for the old field of Hamiltonian systems and led to the creation of a new field: symplectic topology. Surprising rigidity phenomena demonstrate that the nature of symplectic mappings is very different from that of volume preserving mappings. This raises new questions, many of them still unanswered. On the other hand, analysis of an old variational principle in classical mechanics has established global periodic phenomena in Hamiltonian systems. As it turns out, these seemingly different phenomena are mysteriously related. One of the links is a class of symplectic invariants, called symplectic capacities. These invariants are the main theme of this book, which includes such topics as basic symplectic geometry, symplectic capacities and rigidity, periodic orbits for Hamiltonian systems and the action principle, a bi-invariant metric on the symplectic diffeomorphism group and its geometry, symplectic fixed point theory, the Arnold conjectures and first order elliptic systems, and finally a survey on Floer homology and symplectic homology.

The exposition is self-contained and addressed to researchers and students from the graduate level onwards.

In inverse problems, the aim is to obtain, via a mathematical model, information on quantities that are not directly observable but rather depend on other observable quantities. Inverse problems are encountered in such diverse areas of application as medical imaging, remote sensing, material testing, geosciences and financing. It has become evident that new ideas coming from differential geometry and modern analysis are needed to tackle even some of the most classical inverse problems. This book contains a collection of presentations, written by leading specialists, aiming to give the reader up-to-date tools for understanding the current developments in the field.

This book is a comprehensive reference on differential geometry. It shows that Maxwell, Dirac and Einstein fields, which were originally considered objects of a very different mathematical nature, have representatives as objects of the same mathematical nature. The book also analyzes some foundational issues of relativistic field theories. All calculation procedures are illustrated by many exercises that are solved in detail.

The theory of foliations of manifolds was created in the forties of the last century by Ch. Ehresmann and G. Reeb [ER44]. Since then, the subject has enjoyed a rapid development and thousands of papers investigating foliations have appeared. A list of papers and preprints on foliations up to 1995 can be found in Tondeur [Ton97]. Due to the great interest of topologists and geometers in this rapidly ev- ving theory, many books on foliations have also been published one after the other. We mention, for example, the books written by: I. Tamura [Tam76], G. Hector and U. Hirsch [HH83], B. Reinhart [Rei83], C. Camacho and A.L. Neto [CN85], H. Kitahara [Kit86], P. Molino [Mol88], Ph. Tondeur [Ton88], [Ton97], V. Rovenskii [Rov98], A. Candel and L. Conlon [CC03]. Also, the survey written by H.B. Lawson, Jr. [Law74] had a great impact on the de- lopment of the theory of foliations. So it is natural to ask: why write yet another book on foliations? The answerisverysimple.Ourareasofinterestandinvestigationaredi?erent.The main theme of this book is to investigate the interrelations between foliations of a manifold on one hand, and the many geometric structures that the ma- foldmayadmitontheotherhand. Amongthesestructureswemention:a?ne, Riemannian, semi-Riemannian, Finsler, symplectic, and contact structures.

GU Chaohao The soliton theory is an important branch of nonlinear science. On one hand, it describes various kinds of stable motions appearing in - ture, such as solitary water wave, solitary signals in optical ?bre etc., and has many applications in science and technology (like optical signal communication). On the other hand, it gives many e?ective methods ofgetting explicit solutions of nonlinear partial di?erential equations. Therefore, it has attracted much attention from physicists as well as mathematicians. Nonlinearpartialdi?erentialequationsappearinmanyscienti?cpr- lems. Getting explicit solutions is usually a di?cult task. Only in c- tain special cases can the solutions be written down explicitly. However, for many soliton equations, people have found quite a few methods to get explicit solutions. The most famous ones are the inverse scattering method, B] acklund transformation etc.. The inverse scattering method is based on the spectral theory of ordinary di?erential equations. The Cauchyproblemofmanysolitonequationscanbetransformedtosolving a system of linear integral equations. Explicit solutions can be derived when the kernel of the integral equation is degenerate. The B] ac ] klund transformation gives a new solution from a known solution by solving a system of completely integrable partial di?erential equations. Some complicated "nonlinear superposition formula" arise to substitute the superposition principlein linear science."

This is an introduction to classical and quantum mechanics on two-point homogenous Riemannian spaces, empahsizing spaces with constant curvature. Chapters 1-4 provide basic notations for studying two-body dynamics. Chapter 5 deals with the problem of finding explicitly invariant expressions for the two-body quantum Hamiltonian. Chapter 6 addresses one-body problems in a central potential. Chapter 7 investigates the classical counterpart of the quantum system introduced in Chapter 5. Chapter 8 discusses applications in the quantum realm.

Projective duality is a very classical notion naturally arising in various areas of mathematics, such as algebraic and differential geometry, combinatorics, topology, analytical mechanics, and invariant theory, and the results in this field were until now scattered across the literature. Thus the appearance of a book specifically devoted to projective duality is a long-awaited and welcome event.

Projective Duality and Homogeneous Spaces covers a vast and diverse range of topics in the field of dual varieties, ranging from differential geometry to Mori theory and from topology to the theory of algebras. It gives a very readable and thorough account and the presentation of the material is clear and convincing. For the most part of the book the only prerequisites are basic algebra and algebraic geometry.

This book will be of great interest to graduate and postgraduate students as well as professional mathematicians working in algebra, geometry and analysis.

Synthetic Differential Geometry is a method of reasoning in differential geometry and differential calculus, based on the assumption of sufficiently many nilpotent elements on the number line, in particular numbers d such that d2=0. The use of nilpotent elements allows one to replace the limit processes of calculus by purely algebraic calculations and notions. For the first half of the book, first published in 2006, familiarity with differential calculus and abstract algebra is presupposed during the development of results in calculus and differential geometry on a purely axiomatic/synthetic basis. In the second half basic notions of category theory are presumed in the construction of suitable Cartesian closed categories and the interpretation of logical formulae within them. This is a second edition of Kock's classical text from 1981. Many notes have been included, with comments on developments in the field from the intermediate years, and almost 100 new bibliographic entries have been added.

This book deals with such important subjects as variational methods, the continuity method, parabolic equations on fiber bundles, ideas concerning points of concentration, blowing-up technique, geometric and topological methods. It explores important geometric problems that are of interest to many mathematicians and scientists but have only recently been partially solved.

This book provides an introduction to Riemannian geometry, the geometry of curved spaces, for use in a graduate course. Requiring only an understanding of differentiable manifolds, the author covers the introductory ideas of Riemannian geometry followed by a selection of more specialized topics. Also featured are Notes and Exercises for each chapter, to develop and enrich the reader's appreciation of the subject. This second edition, first published in 2006, has a clearer treatment of many topics than the first edition, with new proofs of some theorems and a new chapter on the Riemannian geometry of surfaces. The main themes here are the effect of the curvature on the usual notions of classical Euclidean geometry, and the new notions and ideas motivated by curvature itself. Completely new themes created by curvature include the classical Rauch comparison theorem and its consequences in geometry and topology, and the interaction of microscopic behavior of the geometry with the macroscopic structure of the space.

Since 1992 Finsler geometry, Lagrange geometry and their applications to physics and biology, have been intensive1y studied in the context of a 5-year program called "Memorandum ofUnderstanding", between the University of Alberta and "AL.1. CUZA" University in lasi, Romania. The conference, whose proceedings appear in this collection, belongs to that program and aims to provide a forum for an exchange of ideas and information on recent advances in this field. Besides the Canadian and Romanian researchers involved, the conference benefited from the participation of many specialists from Greece, Hungary and Japan. This proceedings is the second publication of our study group. The first was Lagrange Geometry. Finsler spaces and Noise Applied in Biology and Physics (1]. Lagrange geometry, which is concerned with regular Lagrangians not necessarily homogeneous with respect to the rate (i.e. velocities or production) variables, naturalIy extends Finsler geometry to alIow the study of, for example, metrical structures (i.e. energies) which are not homogeneous in these rates. Most Lagrangians arising in physics falI into this class, for example. Lagrange geometry and its applications in general relativity, unified field theories and re1ativistic optics has been developed mainly by R. Miron and his students and collaborators in Romania, while P. Antonelli and his associates have developed models in ecology, development and evolution and have rigorously laid the foundations ofFinsler diffusion theory [1] .

Many physical phenomena are described by nonlinear evolution equation. Those that are integrable provide various mathematical methods, presented by experts in this tutorial book, to find special analytic solutions to both integrable and partially integrable equations. The direct method to build solutions includes the analysis of singularities a la Painleve, Lie symmetries leaving the equation invariant, extension of the Hirota method, construction of the nonlinear superposition formula. The main inverse method described here relies on the bi-hamiltonian structure of integrable equations. The book also presents some extension to equations with discrete independent and dependent variables.
The different chapters face from different points of view the theory of exact solutions and of the complete integrability of nonlinear evolution equations. Several examples and applications to concrete problems allow the reader to experience directly the power of the different machineries involved."

To our wives, Masha and Marian Interest in the so-called completely integrable systems with infinite num ber of degrees of freedom was aroused immediately after publication of the famous series of papers by Gardner, Greene, Kruskal, Miura, and Zabusky [75, 77, 96, 18, 66, 19J (see also [76]) on striking properties of the Korteweg-de Vries (KdV) equation. It soon became clear that systems of such a kind possess a number of characteristic properties, such as infinite series of symmetries and/or conservation laws, inverse scattering problem formulation, L - A pair representation, existence of prolongation structures, etc. And though no satisfactory definition of complete integrability was yet invented, a need of testing a particular system for these properties appeared. Probably one of the most efficient tests of this kind was first proposed by Lenard [19]' who constructed a recursion operator for symmetries of the KdV equation. It was a strange operator, in a sense: being formally integro-differential, its action on the first classical symmetry (x-translation) was well-defined and produced the entire series of higher KdV equations; but applied to the scaling symmetry, it gave expressions containing terms of the type J u dx which had no adequate interpretation in the framework of the existing theories. It is not surprising that P. Olver wrote "The de duction of the form of the recursion operator (if it exists) requires a certain amount of inspired guesswork. . . " [80, p.

Equivariant cohomology on smooth manifolds is the subject of this book which is part of a collection of volumes edited by J. Bruning and V.W. Guillemin. The point of departure are two relatively short but very remarkable papers be Henry Cartan, published in 1950 in the Proceedings of the "Colloque de Topologie." These papers are reproduced here, together with a modern introduction to the subject, written by two of the leading experts in the field. This "introduction" comes as a textbook of its own, though, presenting the first full treatment of equivariant cohomology in the de Rahm setting. The well known topological approach is linked with the differential form aspect through the equivariant de Rahm theorem. The systematic use of supersymmetry simplifies considerably the ensuing development of the basic technical tools which are then applied to a variety of subjects, leading up to the localization theorems and other very recent results."

This book by two of the foremost researchers and writers in the field is the first part of a treatise that covers the subject in breadth and depth, paying special attention to the historical origins of the theory. Both individually and collectively these volumes have already become standard references.

In this book the authors develop and work out applications to gravity and gauge theories and their interactions with generic matter fields, including spinors in full detail. Spinor fields in particular appear to be the prototypes of truly gauge-natural objects, which are not purely gauge nor purely natural, so that they are a paradigmatic example of the intriguing relations between gauge natural geometry and physical phenomenology. In particular, the gauge natural framework for spinors is developed in this book in full detail, and it is shown to be fundamentally related to the interaction between fermions and dynamical tetrad gravity.

The book covers topics in the theory of algebraic transformation groups and algebraic varieties which are very much at the frontier of mathematical research.