This volume is a collection of papers dedicated to the memory of V. A. Rohlin (1919-1984) - an outstanding mathematician and the founder of the Leningrad topological school. It includes survey and research papers on topology of manifolds, topological aspects of the theory of complex and real algebraic varieties, topology of projective configuration spaces and spaces of convex polytopes.

The problem of uniform distribution of sequences initiated by Hardy, Little wood and Weyl in the 1910's has now become an important part of number theory. This is also true, in relation to combinatorics, of what is called Ramsey theory, a theory of about the same age going back to Schur. Both concern the distribution of sequences of elements in certain collection of subsets. But it was not known until quite recently that the two are closely interweaving bear ing fruits for both. At the same time other fields of mathematics, such as ergodic theory, geometry, information theory, algorithm theory etc. have also joined in. (See the survey articles: V. T. S6s: Irregularities of partitions, Lec ture Notes Series 82, London Math. Soc. , Surveys in Combinatorics, 1983, or J. Beck: Irregularities of distributions and combinatorics, Lecture Notes Series 103, London Math. Soc. , Surveys in Combinatorics, 1985. ) The meeting held at Fertod, Hungary from the 7th to 11th of July, 1986 was to emphasize this development by bringing together a few people working on different aspects of this circle of problems. Although combinatorics formed the biggest contingent (see papers 2, 3, 6, 7, 13) some number theoretic and analytic aspects (see papers 4, 10, 11, 14) generalization of both (5, 8, 9, 12) as well as irregularities of distribution in the geometric theory of numbers (1), the most important instrument in bringing about the above combination of ideas are also represented.

Exploring theories and applications developed during the last 30 years, Digital Geometry in Image Processing presents a mathematical treatment of the properties of digital metric spaces and their relevance in analyzing shapes in two and three dimensions. Unlike similar books, this one connects the two areas of image processing and digital geometry, highlighting important results of digital geometry that are currently used in image analysis and processing. The book discusses different digital geometries in multi-dimensional integral coordinate spaces. It also describes interesting properties of the geometries, including metric and topological properties, shapes of circles and spheres, proximity to Euclidean norms, and number theoretic representations of geometric objects such as straight lines and circles. The authors-all active researchers in image processing and digital geometry-demonstrate how these concepts and properties are useful in various techniques for image processing and analysis. In particular, the book covers applications in object representation and shape analysis. With many figures (some in color) and end-of-chapter exercises, this book provides an in-depth, unified account of digital metrics, the characterization of digital curves and straight lines, and their uses in shape analysis. It gives you insight on the latest two- and three-dimensional image processing applications.

These notes were prepared for the DMV-Seminar held in Dusseldorf, Schloss Mickeln from June 28 to July 5, 1987. They consist of two parts which can be read independently. The reader is presumed to have a basic education in differential and algebraic topology. Surgery theory is the basic tool for the investigation of differential and topological manifolds. A systematic development of the theory is a long and difficult task. The purpose of these notes is to describe simple examples and at the same time to give an introduction to some of the systematic parts of the theory. The first part is concerned with examples. They are related to representations of finite groups and group actions on spheres, and are considered as a generalisation of the spherical space form problem. The second part reviews the general setting of surgery theory and reports on the computation of the surgery abstraction groups. Both parts present material not covered in any textbook and also give an introduction to the literature and areas of research. 1. REPRESENTATION FORMS AND HOMOTOPY REPRESENTATIONS. Tammo tom Dieck Mathematical Institute Gottingen University Fed. Rep. of Germany Let G be a (finite) group. We consider group actions of G on spheres and spherelike spaces.

This is the third published volume of the proceedings of the Israel Seminar on Geometric Aspects of Functional Analysis. The large majority of the papers in this volume are original research papers. There was last year a strong emphasis on classical finite-dimensional convexity theory and its connection with Banach space theory. In recent years, it has become evident that the notions and results of the local theory of Banach spaces are useful in solving classical questions in convexity theory. The present volume contributes to clarifying this point. In addition this volume contains basic contributions to ergodic theory, invariant subspace theory and qualitative differential geometry.

The purpose of these notes is to give a geometrical treatment of generalized homology and cohomology theories. The central idea is that of a 'mock bundle', which is the geometric cocycle of a general cobordism theory, and the main new result is that any homology theory is a generalized bordism theory. The book will interest mathematicians working in both piecewise linear and algebraic topology especially homology theory as it reaches the frontiers of current research in the topic. The book is also suitable for use as a graduate course in homology theory.

Computational synthetic geometry deals with methods for realizing abstract geometric objects in concrete vector spaces. This research monograph considers a large class of problems from convexity and discrete geometry including constructing convex polytopes from simplicial complexes, vector geometries from incidence structures and hyperplane arrangements from oriented matroids. It turns out that algorithms for these constructions exist if and only if arbitrary polynomial equations are decidable with respect to the underlying field. Besides such complexity theorems a variety of symbolic algorithms are discussed, and the methods are applied to obtain new mathematical results on convex polytopes, projective configurations and the combinatorics of Grassmann varieties. Finally algebraic varieties characterizing matroids and oriented matroids are introduced providing a new basis for applying computer algebra methods in this field. The necessary background knowledge is reviewed briefly. The text is accessible to students with graduate level background in mathematics, and will serve professional geometers and computer scientists as an introduction and motivation for further research.

This is an introduction to some geometrie aspects of G-function theory. Most of the results presented here appear in print for the flrst time; hence this text is something intermediate between a standard monograph and a research artic1e; it is not a complete survey of the topic. Except for geometrie chapters (I.3.3, II, IX, X), I have tried to keep it reasonably self contained; for instance, the second part may be used as an introduction to p-adic analysis, starting from a few basic facts wh ich are recalled in IV.l.l. I have inc1uded about forty exercises, most of them giving some complements to the main text. Acknowledgements This book was written during a stay at the Max-Planck-Institut in Bonn. I should like here to express my special gratitude to this institute and its director, F. Hirzebruch, for their generous hospitality. G. Wustholz has suggested the whole project and made its realization possible, and this book would not exist without his help; I thank him heartily. I also thank D. Bertrand, E. Bombieri, K. Diederich, and S. Lang for their encouragements, and D. Bertrand, G. Christo I and H Esnault for stimulating conversations and their help in removing some inaccuracies after a careful reading of parts of the text (any remaining error is however my sole responsibility)."

These notes give a fairly elementary introduction to the local theory of differentiable mappings. Sard's Theorem and the Preparation Theorem of Malgrange and Mather are the basic tools and these are proved first. There follows a number of illustrations including: the local part of Whitney's Theorem on mappings of the plane into the plane, quadratic differentials, the Instability Theorem of Thom, one of Mather's theorems on finite determinacy and a glimpse of the theory of Toujeron. The later part of the book develops Mather's theory of unfoldings of singularities. Its application to Catastrophe theory is explained and the Elementary Catastrophes are illustrated by many pictures. The book is suitable as a text for courses to graduates and advanced undergraduates but may also be of interest to mathematical biologists and economists.

This book brings together into a general setting various techniques in the study of the topological properties of spaces of continuous functions. The two major classes of function space topologies studied are the set-open topologies and the uniform topologies. Where appropriate, the analogous theorems for the two major classes of topologies are studied together, so that a comparison can be made. A chapter on cardinal functions puts characterizations of a number of topological properties of function spaces into a more general setting: some of these results are new, others are generalizations of known theorems. Excercises are included at the end of each chapter, covering other kinds of function space topologies. Thus the book should be appropriate for use in a classroom setting as well as for functional analysis and general topology. The only background needed is some basic knowledge of general topology.

The homotopy index theory was developed by Charles Conley for two sided flows on compact spaces. The homotopy or Conley index, which provides an algebraic-topologi cal measure of an isolated invariant set, is defined to be the ho motopy type of the quotient space N /N, where is a certain 1 2 1 2 compact pair, called an index pair. Roughly speaking, N1 isolates the invariant set and N2 is the "exit ramp" of N . 1 It is shown that the index is independent of the choice of the in dex pair and is invariant under homotopic perturbations of the flow. Moreover, the homotopy index generalizes the Morse index of a nQnde generate critical point p with respect to a gradient flow on a com pact manifold. In fact if the Morse index of p is k, then the homo topy index of the invariant set {p} is Ik - the homotopy type of the pointed k-dimensional unit sphere."

"The book ...is a storehouse of useful information for the mathematicians interested in foliation theory." (John Cantwell, Mathematical Reviews 1992)

The main topics of the conference on "Curves in Projective Space" were good and bad families of projective curves, postulation of projective space curves and classical problems in enumerative geometry.

The purpose of this book is to revive some of the beautiful results obtained by various geometers of the 19th century, and to give its readers a taste of concrete algebraic geometry. A good deal of space is devoted to cross-ratios, conics, quadrics, and various interesting curves and surfaces. The fundamentals of projective geometry are efficiently dealt with by using a modest amount of linear algebra. An axiomatic characterization of projective planes is also given. While the topology of projective spaces over real and complex fields is described, and while the geometry of the complex projective libe is applied to the study of circles and Moebius transformations, the book is not restricted to these fields. Interesting properties of projective spaces, conics, and quadrics over finite fields are also given. This book is the first volume in the Readings in Mathematics sub-series of the UTM. From the reviews: "...The book of P. Samuel thus fills a gap in the literature. It is a little jewel. Starting from a minimal background in algebra, he succeeds in 160 pages in giving a coherent exposition of all of projective geometry. ... one reads this book like a novel. " D.Lazard in Gazette des Mathematiciens#1

This book examines the geometrical notion of orthogonality, and shows how to use it as the primitive concept on which to base a metric structure in affine geometry. The subject has a long history, and an extensive literature, but whatever novelty there may be in the study presented here comes from its focus on geometries hav ing lines that are self-orthogonal, or even singular (orthogonal to all lines). The most significant examples concern four-dimensional special-relativistic spacetime (Minkowskian geometry), and its var ious sub-geometries, and these will be prominent throughout. But the project is intended as an exercise in the foundations of geome try that does not presume a knowledge of physics, and so, in order to provide the appropriate intuitive background, an initial chapter has been included that gives a description of the different types of line (timelike, spacelike, lightlike) that occur in spacetime, and the physical meaning of the orthogonality relations that hold between them. The coordinatisation of affine spaces makes use of constructions from projective geometry, including standard results about the ma trix represent ability of certain projective transformations (involu tions, polarities). I have tried to make the work sufficiently self contained that it may be used as the basis for a course at the ad vanced undergraduate level, assuming only an elementary knowledge of linear and abstract algebra."

The manifolds investigated in this monograph are generalizations of (XX)-rank one locally symmetric spaces. In the first part of the book the author develops spectral theory for the differential Laplacian operator associated to the so-called generalized Dirac operators on manifolds with cusps of rank one. This includes the case of spinor Laplacians on (XX)-rank one locally symmetric spaces. The time-dependent approach to scattering theory is taken to derive the main results about the spectral resolution of these operators. The second part of the book deals with the derivation of an index formula for generalized Dirac operators on manifolds with cusps of rank one. This index formula is used to prove a conjecture of Hirzebruch concerning the relation of signature defects of cusps of Hilbert modular varieties and special values of L-series. This book is intended for readers working in the field of automorphic forms and analysis on non-compact Riemannian manifolds, and assumes a knowledge of PDE, scattering theory and harmonic analysis on semisimple Lie groups.

Approach your problems from the right end It isn't that they can't see the solution. and begin with the answers. Then one day, It is that they can't see the problem. perhaps you will find the final question. G. K. Chesterton. The Scandal of Father 'The Hermit Clad in Crane Feathers' Brown 'The point of a Pin'. in R. van Gulik's The Chinese Maze Murders. Growing specialization and diversification have brought a host of monographs and textbooks on increasingly specialized topics. However, the "tree" of knowledge of mathematics and related fields does not grow only by putting forth new branches. It also happens, quite often in fact, that branches which were thouglit to be completely disparate are suddenly seen to be related. Further, the kind and level of sophistication of mathematics applied in various sci ences has changed drastically in recent years: measure theory is used (non-trivially) in re gional and theoretical economics; algebraic geometry interacts with physics; the Minkowsky lemma, coding theory and the structure of water meet one another in packing and covering theory; quantum fields, crystal defects and mathematical programming profit from homo topy theory; Lie algebras are relevant to filtering; and prediction and electrical engineering can use Stein spaces."

An Outline of a General Theory of Models. Translation of Stabilit tructurelle et Morphog'se.

1.1 General Introduction The work which comprises this essay formed part of a multidiscip linary project investigating the folding of the developing cerebral cortex in the ferret. The project as a whole combined a study, at the histological level, of the cytoarchitectural development concom itant with folding and a mathematical study of folding viewed from the perspective of differential geometry. We here concentrate on the differential geometry of brain folding. Histological results which have some significance to the geometry of the cortex are re ferred to, but are not discussed in any depth. As with any truly multidisciplinary work, this essay has objectives which lie in each of its constituent disciplines. From a neuroana tomical point of view, the work explores the use of the surface geo metry of the developing cortex as a parameter for the underlying growth process. Geometrical parameters of particular interest and theoretical importance are surface curvatures. Our experimental portion reports the measurement of the surface curvature of the ferret brain during the early stages of folding. The use of sur face curvatures and other parameters of differential geometry in the formulation of theoretical models of cortical folding is dis cussed."

A Nash manifold denotes a real manifold furnished with algebraic structure, following a theorem of Nash that a compact differentiable manifold can be imbedded in a Euclidean space so that the image is precisely such a manifold. This book, in which almost all results are very recent or unpublished, is an account of the theory of Nash manifolds, whose properties are clearer and more regular than those of differentiable or PL manifolds. Basic to the theory is an algebraic analogue of Whitney's Approximation Theorem. This theorem induces a "finiteness" of Nash manifold structures and differences between Nash and differentiable manifolds. The point of view of the author is topological. However the proofs also require results and techniques from other domains so elementary knowledge of commutative algebra, several complex variables, differential topology, PL topology and real singularities is required of the reader. The book is addressed to graduate students and researchers in differential topology and real algebraic geometry.

Foliation theory grew out of the theory of dynamical systems on manifolds and Ch. Ehresmann's connection theory on fibre bundles. Pioneer work was done between 1880 and 1940 by H. Poincare, I. Bendixson, H. Kneser, H. Whitney, and IV. Kaplan - to name a few - who all studied "regular curve families" on surfaces, and later by Ch. Ehresmann, G. Reeb, A. Haefliger and otners between 1940 and 1960. Since then the subject has developed from a collection of a few papers to a wide field of research. ~owadays, one usually distinguishes between two main branches of foliation theory, the so-called quantitative theory (including homotopy theory and cnaracteristic classes) on the one hand, and the qualitative or geometrie theory on the other. The present volume is the first part of a monograph on geometrie aspects of foliations. Our intention here is to present some fundamental concepts and results as weIl as a great number of ideas and examples of various types. The selection of material from only one branch of the theory is conditioned not only by the authors' personal interest but also by the wish to give a systematic and detailed treatment, including complete proofs of all main results. We hope that tilis goal has been achieved.

This set of notes, for graduate students who are specializing in algebraic topology, adopts a novel approach to the teaching of the subject. It begins with a survey of the most beneficial areas for study, with recommendations regarding the best written accounts of each topic. Because a number of the sources are rather inaccessible to students, the second part of the book comprises a collection of some of these classic expositions, from journals, lecture notes, theses and conference proceedings. They are connected by short explanatory passages written by Professor Adams, whose own contributions to this branch of mathematics are represented in the reprinted articles.