Few people have proved more influential in the field of differential and algebraic geometry, and in showing how this links with mathematical physics, than Nigel Hitchin. Oxford University's Savilian Professor of Geometry has made fundamental contributions in areas as diverse as: spin geometry, instanton and monopole equations, twistor theory, symplectic geometry of moduli spaces, integrables systems, Higgs bundles, Einstein metrics, hyperkahler geometry, Frobenius manifolds, Painleve equations, special Lagrangian geometry and mirror symmetry, theory of grebes, and many more.
He was previously Rouse Ball Professor of Mathematics at Cambridge University, as well as Professor of Mathematics at the University of Warwick, is a Fellow of the Royal Society and has been the President of the London Mathematical Society.
The chapters in this fascinating volume, written by some of the greats in their fields (including four Fields Medalists), show how Hitchin's ideas have impacted on a wide variety of subjects. The book grew out of the Geometry Conference in Honour of Nigel Hitchin, held in Madrid, with some additional contributions, and should be required reading for anyone seeking insights into the overlap between geometry and physics."

We experience elasticity everywhere in daily life: in the straightening or curling of hairs, the irreversible deformations of car bodies after a crash, or the bouncing of elastic balls in ping-pong or soccer. The theory of elasticity is essential to the recent developments of applied and fundamental science, such as the bio-mechanics of DNA filaments and other macro-molecules, and the animation of virtual characters in computer graphics and materials science. In this book, the emphasis is on the elasticity of thin bodies (plates, shells, rods) in connection with geometry. It covers such topics as the mechanics of hairs (curled and straight), the buckling instabilities of stressed plates, including folds and conical points appearing at larger stresses, the geometric rigidity of elastic shells, and the delamination of thin compressed films. It applies general methods of classical analysis, including advanced nonlinear aspects (bifurcation theory, boundary layer analysis), to derive detailed, fully explicit solutions to specific problems. These theoretical concepts are discussed in connection with experiments. The book is self-contained. Mathematical prerequisites are vector analysis and differential equations. The book can serve as a concrete introduction to nonlinear methods in analysis.

The book gathers contributions from the fourth conference on Information Geometry and its Applications, which was held on June 12-17, 2016, at Liblice Castle, Czech Republic on the occasion of Shun-ichi Amari's 80th birthday and was organized by the Czech Academy of Sciences' Institute of Information Theory and Automation. The conference received valuable financial support from the Max Planck Institute for Mathematics in the Sciences (Information Theory of Cognitive Systems Group), Czech Academy of Sciences' Institute of Information Theory and Automation, and Universita degli Studi di Roma Tor Vergata. The aim of the conference was to highlight recent advances in the field of information geometry and to identify new research directions. To this end, the event brought together leading experts in the field who, in invited talks and poster sessions, discussed both theoretical work and achievements in the many fields of application in which information geometry plays an essential role.

Asymptotic Geometric Analysis is concerned with the geometric and linear properties of finite dimensional objects, normed spaces, and convex bodies, especially with the asymptotics of their various quantitative parameters as the dimension tends to infinity. The deep geometric, probabilistic, and combinatorial methods developed here are used outside the field in many areas of mathematics and mathematical sciences. The Fields Institute Thematic Program in the Fall of 2010 continued an established tradition of previous large-scale programs devoted to the same general research direction. The main directions of the program included:

* Asymptotic theory of convexity and normed spaces

* Concentration of measure and isoperimetric inequalities, optimal transportation approach

* Applications of the concept of concentration

* Connections with transformation groups and Ramsey theory

* Geometrization of probability

* Random matrices

* Connection with asymptotic combinatorics and complexity theory

These directions are represented in this volume and reflect the present state of this important area of research. It will be of benefit to researchers working in a wide range of mathematical sciences in particular functional analysis, combinatorics, convex geometry, dynamical systems, operator algebras, and computer science.

Stochastic Geometry is a subject with roots stretching back at least 300 years, but one which has only been formed as an academic area in the last 50 years. It covers the study of random patterns, their probability theory, and the challenging problems raised by their statistical analysis. It has grown rapidly in response to challenges in all kinds of applied science, from image analysis through to materials science. Recently, still more stimulus has arisen from exciting new links with rapidly developing areas of mathematics, from fractals through percolation theory to randomized allocation schemes. Coupled with many ongoing developments arising from all sorts of applications, the area is changing and developing rapidly.
New Perspectives in Stochastic Geometry will lay foundations for future research directions, by collecting together 17 chapters contributed by leading researchers in the field, both theoreticians and people involved in applications, surveying these new developments both in theory and in applications. It will introduce and lay foundations for appreciating the fresh perspectives, new ideas and interdisciplinary connections now arising from Stochastic Geometry and from other areas of mathematics now connecting to this area. This will benefit young researchers wishing to gain quick access to the area, scientists from other fields wanting perspectives on what the area has to offer their own speciality, and workers already active in the field who will enjoy and profit from the coverage of a wide and rapidly developing field.

This interdisciplinary book covers a wide range of subjects, from pure mathematics (knots, braids, homotopy theory, number theory) to more applied mathematics (cryptography, algebraic specification of algorithms, dynamical systems) and concrete applications (modeling of polymers and ionic liquids, video, music and medical imaging). The main mathematical focus throughout the book is on algebraic modeling with particular emphasis on braid groups. The research methods include algebraic modeling using topological structures, such as knots, 3-manifolds, classical homotopy groups, and braid groups. The applications address the simulation of polymer chains and ionic liquids, as well as the modeling of natural phenomena via topological surgery. The treatment of computational structures, including finite fields and cryptography, focuses on the development of novel techniques. These techniques can be applied to the design of algebraic specifications for systems modeling and verification. This book is the outcome of a workshop in connection with the research project Thales on Algebraic Modeling of Topological and Computational Structures and Applications, held at the National Technical University of Athens, Greece in July 2015. The reader will benefit from the innovative approaches to tackling difficult questions in topology, applications and interrelated research areas, which largely employ algebraic tools.

Classical mechanics, one of the oldest branches of science, has undergone a long evolution, developing hand in hand with many areas of mathematics, including calculus, differential geometry, and the theory of Lie groups and Lie algebras. The modern formulations of Lagrangian and Hamiltonian mechanics, in the coordinate-free language of differential geometry, are elegant and general. They provide a unifying framework for many seemingly disparate physical systems, such as n-particle systems, rigid bodies, fluids and other continua, and electromagnetic and quantum systems.
Geometric Mechanics and Symmetry is a friendly and fast-paced introduction to the geometric approach to classical mechanics, suitable for a one- or two- semester course for beginning graduate students or advanced undergraduates. It fills a gap between traditional classical mechanics texts and advanced modern mathematical treatments of the subject. After a summary of the necessary elements of calculus on smooth manifolds and basic Lie group theory, the main body of the text considers how symmetry reduction of Hamilton's principle allows one to derive and analyze the Euler-Poincare equations for dynamics on Lie groups.
Additional topics deal with rigid and pseudo-rigid bodies, the heavy top, shallow water waves, geophysical fluid dynamics and computational anatomy. The text ends with a discussion of the semidirect-product Euler-Poincare reduction theorem for ideal fluid dynamics.
A variety of examples and figures illustrate the material, while the many exercises, both solved and unsolved, make the book a valuable class text."

One of the ways in which topology has influenced other branches of mathematics in the past few decades is by putting the study of continuity and convergence into a general setting. This new edition of Wilson Sutherland's classic text introduces metric and topological spaces by describing some of that influence. The aim is to move gradually from familiar real analysis to abstract topological spaces, using metric spaces as a bridge between the two. The language of metric and topological spaces is established with continuity as the motivating concept. Several concepts are introduced, first in metric spaces and then repeated for topological spaces, to help convey familiarity. The discussion develops to cover connectedness, compactness and completeness, a trio widely used in the rest of mathematics.
Topology also has a more geometric aspect which is familiar in popular expositions of the subject as rubber-sheet geometry', with pictures of Mobius bands, doughnuts, Klein bottles and the like; this geometric aspect is illustrated by describing some standard surfaces, and it is shown how all this fits into the same story as the more analytic developments.
The book is primarily aimed at second- or third-year mathematics students. There are numerous exercises, many of the more challenging ones accompanied by hints, as well as a companion website, with further explanations and examples as well as material supplementary to that in the book."

This book draws on elements from everyday life, architecture, and the arts to provide the reader with elementary notions of geometric topology. Pac Man, subway maps, and architectural blueprints are the starting point for exploring how knowledge about geometry and, more specifically, topology has been consolidated over time, offering a learning journey that is both dense and enjoyable. The text begins with a discussion of mathematical models, moving on to Platonic and Keplerian theories that explain the Cosmos. Geometry from Felix Klein's point of view is then presented, paving the way to an introduction to topology. The final chapters present the concepts of closed, orientable, and non-orientable surfaces, as well as hypersurface models. Adopting a style that is both rigorous and accessible, this book will appeal to a broad audience, from curious students and researchers in various areas of knowledge to everyone who feels instigated by the power of mathematics in representing our world - and beyond.

This book focuses on origami from the point of view of computer science. Ranging from basic theorems to the latest research results, the book introduces the considerably new and fertile research field of computational origami as computer science. Part I introduces basic knowledge of the geometry of development, also called a net, of a solid. Part II further details the topic of nets. In the science of nets, there are numerous unresolved issues, and mathematical characterization and the development of efficient algorithms by computer are closely connected with each other. Part III discusses folding models and their computational complexity. When a folding model is fixed, to find efficient ways of folding is to propose efficient algorithms. If this is difficult, it is intractable in terms of computational complexity. This is, precisely, an area for computer science research. Part IV presents some of the latest research topics as advanced problems. Commentaries on all exercises included in the last chapter. The contents are organized in a self-contained way, and no previous knowledge is required. This book is suitable for undergraduate, graduate, and even high school students, as well as researchers and engineers interested in origami.

This book is the result of a conference on arithmetic geometry, held July 30 through August 10, 1984 at the University of Connecticut at Storrs, the purpose of which was to provide a coherent overview of the subject. This subject has enjoyed a resurgence in popularity due in part to Faltings' proof of Mordell's conjecture. Included are extended versions of almost all of the instructional lectures and, in addition, a translation into English of Faltings' ground-breaking paper. ARITHMETIC GEOMETRY should be of great use to students wishing to enter this field, as well as those already working in it. This revised second printing now includes a comprehensive index.

This unique reference, aimed at research topologists, gives an exposition of the 'pseudo-Anosov' theory of foliations of 3-manifolds. This theory generalizes Thurston's theory of surface automorphisms and reveals an intimate connection between dynamics, geometry and topology in 3 dimensions. Significant themes returned to throughout the text include the importance of geometry, especially the hyperbolic geometry of surfaces, the importance of monotonicity, especially in 1-dimensional and co-dimensional dynamics, and combinatorial approximation, using finite combinatorical objects such as train-tracks, branched surfaces and hierarchies to carry more complicated continuous objects.

Cuts and metrics are well-known objects that arise - independently, but with many deep and fascinating connections - in diverse fields: in graph theory, combinatorial optimization, geometry of numbers, combinatorial matrix theory, statistical physics, VLSI design etc. This book offers a comprehensive summary together with a global view, establishing both old and new links. Its treatment ranges from classical theorems of Menger and Schoenberg to recent developments such as approximation results for multicommodity flow and max-cut problems, metric aspects of Delaunay polytopes, isometric graph embeddings, and matrix completion problems. The discussion leads to many interesting subjects that cannot be found elsewhere, providing a unique and invaluable source for researchers and graduate students.

Ten years after a 1989 meeting of number theorists and physicists at the Centre de Physique des Houches, a second event focused on the broader interface of number theory, geometry, and physics. This book is the first of two volumes resulting from that meeting. Broken into three parts, it covers Conformal Field Theories, Discrete Groups, and Renormalization, offering extended versions of the lecture courses and shorter texts on special topics.

This volume contains the Proceedings of the Special Seminar on: FRAGTALS held from October 9-15, 1988 at the Ettore Majorana Centre for Scientific Culture, Erice (Trapani), Italy. The concepts of self-similarity and scale invariance have arisen independently in several areas. One is the study of critical properites of phase transitions; another is fractal geometry, which involves the concept of (non-integer) fractal dimension. These two areas have now come together, and their methods have extended to various fields of physics. The purpose of this Seminar was to provide an overview of the recent developments in the field. Most of the contributions are theoretical, but some experimental work is also included. Du: cing the past few years two tendencies have emerged in this field: one is to realize that many phenomena can be naturally modelled by fractal structures. So one can use this concept to define simple modele and study their physical properties. The second point of view is more microscopic and tries to answer the question: why nature gives rise to fractal structures. This implies the formulation of fractal growth modele based on physical concepts and their theoretical understanding in the same sense as the Renormalization Group method has allowed to understand the critical properties of phase transitions

This book focuses on important mathematical considerations in describing the synthesis of original mechanisms for generating curves. The synthesis is manual and not based on the use of computer tools. Kinematics is applied to confirm the drawing of the curves, and the closed loop method, and in some cases the distances method, is applied in this phase. The book provides all the notions of structure and kinematics that are necessary to calculate the mechanisms and also analyzes other kinematic possibilities of the created mechanisms. Offering a concise, yet self-contained guide to the mathematical fundamentals for mechanisms of curve generation, together with a useful collection of mechanisms exercises, the book is intended for students learning about mechanism kinematics, as well as engineers dealing with mechanism design and analysis. It is based on the authors' many years of research, which has been published in different books and journals, mainly, but not exclusively, in Romanian.

Geometry: A Metric Approach with Models, imparts a real feeling for Euclidean and non-Euclidean (in particular, hyperbolic) geometry. Intended as a rigorous first course, the book introduces and develops the various axioms slowly, and then, in a departure from other texts, continually illustrates the major definitions and axioms with two or three models, enabling the reader to picture the idea more clearly. The second edition has been expanded to include a selection of expository exercises. Additionally, the authors have designed software with computational problems to accompany the text. This software may be obtained from George Parker.

The book consists of articles based on the XXXVII Bialowieza Workshop on Geometric Methods in Physics, 2018. The series of Bialowieza workshops, attended by a community of experts at the crossroads of mathematics and physics, is a major annual event in the field. This edition of the workshop featured a special session dedicated to Professor Daniel Sternheimer on the occasion of his 80th birthday. The previously unpublished papers present cutting-edge current research, typically grounded in geometry and analysis, with applications to classical and quantum physics. For the past seven years, the Bialowieza Workshops have been complemented by a School on Geometry and Physics comprising a series of advanced lectures for graduate students and early-career researchers. The book also includes abstracts of the five lecture series that were given at the seventh school.

Incidence geometry is a central part of modern mathematicsthat has an impressive tradition. The main topics of incidence geometry are projective and affine geometry and, in more recent times, the theory of buildings and polar spaces.

Embedded into the modern view of diagram geometry, projective and affine geometry including the fundamental theorems, polar geometry including the Theorem of Buekenhout-Shult and the classification of quadratic sets are presented in this volume. Incidence geometry is developed along the lines of the fascinating work of Jacques Tits and Francis Buekenhout.

The book is a clear and comprehensible introduction into a wonderful piece of mathematics. More than 200 figures make even complicated proofs accessible to the reader."

While it is well known that the Delian problems are impossible to solve with a straightedge and compass - for example, it is impossible to construct a segment whose length is cube root of 2 with these instruments - the discovery of the Italian mathematician Margherita Beloch Piazzolla in 1934 that one can in fact construct a segment of length cube root of 2 with a single paper fold was completely ignored (till the end of the 1980s). This comes as no surprise, since with few exceptions paper folding was seldom considered as a mathematical practice, let alone as a mathematical procedure of inference or proof that could prompt novel mathematical discoveries. A few questions immediately arise: Why did paper folding become a non-instrument? What caused the marginalisation of this technique? And how was the mathematical knowledge, which was nevertheless transmitted and prompted by paper folding, later treated and conceptualised? Aiming to answer these questions, this volume provides, for the first time, an extensive historical study on the history of folding in mathematics, spanning from the 16th century to the 20th century, and offers a general study on the ways mathematical knowledge is marginalised, disappears, is ignored or becomes obsolete. In doing so, it makes a valuable contribution to the field of history and philosophy of science, particularly the history and philosophy of mathematics and is highly recommended for anyone interested in these topics.

This monograph, for the first time in book form, considers the large structure of metric spaces as captured by bornologies: families of subsets that contain the singletons, that are stable under finite unions, and that are stable under taking subsets of its members. The largest bornology is the power set of the space and the smallest is the bornology of its finite subsets. Between these lie (among others) the metrically bounded subsets, the relatively compact subsets, the totally bounded subsets, and the Bourbaki bounded subsets. Classes of functions are intimately connected to various bornologies; e.g., (1) a function is locally Lipschitz if and only if its restriction to each relatively compact subset is Lipschitz; (2) a subset is Bourbaki bounded if and only if each uniformly continuous function on the space is bounded when restricted to the subset. A great deal of attention is given to the variational notions of strong uniform continuity and strong uniform convergence with respect to the members of a bornology, leading to the bornology of UC-subsets and UC-spaces. Spaces on which its uniformly continuous real-valued functions are stable under pointwise product are characterized in terms of the coincidence of the Bourbaki bounded subsets with a usually larger bornology. Special attention is given to Lipschitz and locally Lipschitz functions. For example, uniformly dense subclasses of locally Lipschitz functions within the real-valued continuous functions, Cauchy continuous functions, and uniformly continuous functions are presented. It is shown very generally that a function between metric spaces has a particular metric property if and only if whenever it is followed in a composition by a real-valued Lipschitz function, the composition has the property. Bornological convergence of nets of closed subsets, having Attouch-Wets convergence as a prototype, is considered in detail. Topologies of uniform convergence for continuous linear operators between normed spaces is explained in terms of the bornological convergence of their graphs. Finally, the idea of a bornological extension of a topological space is presented, and all regular extensions can be so realized.

This book covers methods of Mathematical Morphology to model and simulate random sets and functions (scalar and multivariate). The introduced models concern many physical situations in heterogeneous media, where a probabilistic approach is required, like fracture statistics of materials, scaling up of permeability in porous media, electron microscopy images (including multispectral images), rough surfaces, multi-component composites, biological tissues, textures for image coding and synthesis. The common feature of these random structures is their domain of definition in n dimensions, requiring more general models than standard Stochastic Processes.The main topics of the book cover an introduction to the theory of random sets, random space tessellations, Boolean random sets and functions, space-time random sets and functions (Dead Leaves, Sequential Alternate models, Reaction-Diffusion), prediction of effective properties of random media, and probabilistic fracture theories.

The book consists of a presentation from scratch of cycle space methodology in complex geometry. Applications in various contexts are given. A significant portion of the book is devoted to material which is important in the general area of complex analysis. In this regard, a geometric approach is used to obtain fundamental results such as the local parameterization theorem, Lelong' s Theorem and Remmert's direct image theorem. Methods involving cycle spaces have been used in complex geometry for some forty years. The purpose of the book is to systematically explain these methods in a way which is accessible to graduate students in mathematics as well as to research mathematicians. After the background material which is presented in the initial chapters, families of cycles are treated in the last most important part of the book. Their topological aspects are developed in a systematic way and some basic, important applications of analytic families of cycles are given. The construction of the cycle space as a complex space, along with numerous important applications, is given in the second volume. The present book is a translation of the French version that was published in 2014 by the French Mathematical Society.

Geometry of Derivation with Applications is the fifth work in a longstanding series of books on combinatorial geometry (Subplane Covered Nets, Foundations of Translation Planes, Handbook of Finite Translation Planes, and Combinatorics of Spreads and Parallelisms). Like its predecessors, this book will primarily deal with connections to the theory of derivable nets and translation planes in both the finite and infinite cases. Translation planes over non-commutative skewfields have not traditionally had a significant representation in incidence geometry, and derivable nets over skewfields have only been marginally understood. Both are deeply examined in this volume, while ideas of non-commutative algebra are also described in detail, with all the necessary background given a geometric treatment. The book builds upon over twenty years of work concerning combinatorial geometry, charted across four previous books and is suitable as a reference text for graduate students and researchers. It contains a variety of new ideas and generalizations of established work in finite affine geometry and is replete with examples and applications.

Visualization research aims to provide insight into large, complicated data sets and the phenomena behind them. While there are di?erent methods of reaching this goal, topological methods stand out for their solid mathem- ical foundation, which guides the algorithmic analysis and its presentation. Topology-based methods in visualization have been around since the beg- ning of visualization as a scienti?c discipline, but they initially played only a minor role. In recent years,interest in topology-basedvisualization has grown andsigni?cantinnovationhasledto newconceptsandsuccessfulapplications. The latest trends adapt basic topological concepts to precisely express user interests in topological properties of the data. This book is the outcome of the second workshop on Topological Methods in Visualization, which was held March 4-6, 2007 in Kloster Nimbschen near Leipzig,Germany.Theworkshopbroughttogethermorethan40international researchers to present and discuss the state of the art and new trends in the ?eld of topology-based visualization. Two inspiring invited talks by George Haller, MIT, and Nelson Max, LLNL, were accompanied by 14 presentations by participants and two panel discussions on current and future trends in visualization research. This book contains thirteen research papers that have been peer-reviewed in a two-stage review process. In the ?rst phase, submitted papers where peer-reviewed by the international program committee. After the workshop accepted papers went through a revision and a second review process taking into account comments from the ?rst round and discussions at the workshop. Abouthalfthepapersconcerntopology-basedanalysisandvisualizationof ?uid?owsimulations;twopapersconcernmoregeneraltopologicalalgorithms, while the remaining papers discuss topology-based visualization methods in application areas like biology, medical imaging and electromagnetism.