Based on lectures given at the renowned Villa de Leyva summer school, this book provides a unique presentation of modern geometric methods in quantum field theory. Written by experts, it enables readers to enter some of the most fascinating research topics in this subject. Covering a series of topics on geometry, topology, algebra, number theory methods and their applications to quantum field theory, the book covers topics such as Dirac structures, holomorphic bundles and stability, Feynman integrals, geometric aspects of quantum field theory and the standard model, spectral and Riemannian geometry and index theory. This is a valuable guide for graduate students and researchers in physics and mathematics wanting to enter this interesting research field at the borderline between mathematics and physics.

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.

This unique book on modern topology looks well beyond traditional treatises and explores spaces that may, but need not, be Hausdorff. This is essential for domain theory, the cornerstone of semantics of computer languages, where the Scott topology is almost never Hausdorff. For the first time in a single volume, this book covers basic material on metric and topological spaces, advanced material on complete partial orders, Stone duality, stable compactness, quasi-metric spaces and much more. An early chapter on metric spaces serves as an invitation to the topic (continuity, limits, compactness, completeness) and forms a complete introductory course by itself. Graduate students and researchers alike will enjoy exploring this treasure trove of results. Full proofs are given, as well as motivating ideas, clear explanations, illuminating examples, application exercises and some more challenging problems for more advanced readers.

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

The aim of the book is to give a broad introduction of topology to undergraduate students. It covers the most important and useful parts of the point-set as well as the combinatorial topology. The development of the material is from simple to complex, concrete to abstract, and appeals to the intuition of readers. Attention is also paid to how topology is actually used in the other fields of mathematics. Over 150 illustrations, 160 examples and 600 exercises will help readers to practice and fully understand the subject. Contents: Set and Map Metric Space Graph Topology Topological Concepts Complex Topological Properties Surface Topics in Point Set Topology Index

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.

This book introduces the reader to powerful methods of critical point theory and details successful contemporary approaches to many problems, some of which had proved resistant to attack by older methods. Topics covered include Morse theory, critical groups, the minimax principle, various notions of linking, jumping nonlinearities and the Fucik spectrum in an abstract setting, sandwich pairs and the cohomological index. Applications to semilinear elliptic boundary value problems, p-Laplacian problems and anisotropic systems are given. Written for graduate students and research scientists, the book includes numerous examples and presents more recent developments in the subject to bring the reader up to date with the latest research.

Incorporated in this 2003 volume are the first two books in Mukai's series on moduli theory. The notion of a moduli space is central to geometry. However, its influence is not confined there; for example, the theory of moduli spaces is a crucial ingredient in the proof of Fermat's last theorem. Researchers and graduate students working in areas ranging from Donaldson or Seiberg-Witten invariants to more concrete problems such as vector bundles on curves will find this to be a valuable resource. Amongst other things this volume includes an improved presentation of the classical foundations of invarant theory that, in addition to geometers, would be useful to those studying representation theory. This translation gives an accurate account of Mukai's influential Japanese texts.

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.

Inverse limits provide a powerful tool for constructing complicated spaces from simple ones. Theyalso turn the study of a dynamical system consisting of a space and a self-map into a study of a (likely more complicated) space and a self-homeomorphism. In four chapters along with an appendix containing background material the authors develop the theory of inverse limits. The bookbegins with an introduction through inverse limits on 0,1] before moving to a general treatment of the subject. Special topics in continuum theory complete thebook. Although it is not a book on dynamics, the influence of dynamics can be seen throughout; for instance, it includes studies of inverse limits with maps from families of maps that are of interest to dynamicists such as the logistic and the tent families.

This book will serve as a useful reference to graduate students and researchers in continuum theory and dynamical systems. Researchers working in applied areas who are discovering inverse limits in their work will also benefit from this book. "

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)

The theory presented in this book is developed constructively, is based on a few axioms encapsulating the notion of objects (points and sets) being apart, and encompasses both point-set topology and the theory of uniform spaces. While the classical-logic-based theory of proximity spaces provides some guidance for the theory of apartness, the notion of nearness/proximity does not embody enough algorithmic information for a deep constructive development. The use of constructive (intuitionistic) logic in this book requires much more technical ingenuity than one finds in classical proximity theory -- algorithmic information does not come cheaply -- but it often reveals distinctions that are rendered invisible by classical logic. In the first chapter the authors outline informal constructive logic and set theory, and, briefly, the basic notions and notations for metric and topological spaces. In the second they introduce axioms for a point-set apartness and then explore some of the consequences of those axioms. In particular, they examine a natural topology associated with an apartness space, and relations between various types of continuity of mappings. In the third chapter the authors extend the notion of point-set (pre-)apartness axiomatically to one of (pre-)apartness between subsets of an inhabited set. They then provide axioms for a quasiuniform space, perhaps the most important type of set-set apartness space. Quasiuniform spaces play a major role in the remainder of the chapter, which covers such topics as the connection between uniform and strong continuity (arguably the most technically difficult part of the book), apartness and convergence in function spaces, types of completeness, and neat compactness. Each chapter has a Notes section, in which are found comments on the definitions, results, and proofs, as well as occasional pointers to future work. The book ends with a Postlude that refers to other constructive approaches to topology, with emphasis on the relation between apartness spaces and formal topology. Largely an exposition of the authors' own research, this is the first book dealing with the apartness approach to constructive topology, and is a valuable addition to the literature on constructive mathematics and on topology in computer science. It is aimed at graduate students and advanced researchers in theoretical computer science, mathematics, and logic who are interested in constructive/algorithmic aspects of topology.

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.

The classical story - of the hypergeometric functions, the configuration space of 4 points on the projective line, elliptic curves, elliptic modular functions and the theta functions - now evolves, in this book, to the story of hypergeometric funktions in 4 variables, the configuration space of 6 points in the projective plane, K3 surfaces, theta functions in 4 variables.
This modern theory has been established by the author and his collaborators in the 1990's; further development to different aspects is expected.
It leads the reader to a fascinating 4-dimensional world.
The author tells the story casually and visually in a plain language, starting form elementary level such as equivalence relations, the exponential function, ... Undergraduate students should be able to enjoy the text.

Translated from the popular French edition, the goal of the book is to provide a self-contained introduction to mean topological dimension, an invariant of dynamical systems introduced in 1999 by Misha Gromov. The book examines how this invariant was successfully used by Elon Lindenstrauss and Benjamin Weiss to answer a long-standing open question about embeddings of minimal dynamical systems into shifts. A large number of revisions and additions have been made to the original text. Chapter 5 contains an entirely new section devoted to the Sorgenfrey line. Two chapters have also been added: Chapter 9 on amenable groups and Chapter 10 on mean topological dimension for continuous actions of countable amenable groups. These new chapters contain material that have never before appeared in textbook form. The chapter on amenable groups is based on Folner's characterization of amenability and may be read independently from the rest of the book. Although the contents of this book lead directly to several active areas of current research in mathematics and mathematical physics, the prerequisites needed for reading it remain modest; essentially some familiarities with undergraduate point-set topology and, in order to access the final two chapters, some acquaintance with basic notions in group theory. Topological Dimension and Dynamical Systems is intended for graduate students, as well as researchers interested in topology and dynamical systems. Some of the topics treated in the book directly lead to research areas that remain to be explored.

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.

In the more than 100 years since the fundamental group was first introduced by Henri Poincare it has evolved to play an important role in different areas of mathematics. Originally conceived as part of algebraic topology, this essential concept and its analogies have found numerous applications in mathematics that are still being investigated today, and which are explored in this volume, the result of a meeting at Heidelberg University that brought together mathematicians who use or study fundamental groups in their work with an eye towards applications in arithmetic. The book acknowledges the varied incarnations of the fundamental group: pro-finite, -adic, p-adic, pro-algebraic and motivic. It explores a wealth of topics that range from anabelian geometry (in particular the section conjecture), the -adic polylogarithm, gonality questions of modular curves, vector bundles in connection with monodromy, and relative pro-algebraic completions, to a motivic version of Minhyong Kim's non-abelian Chabauty method and p-adic integration after Coleman. The editor has also included the abstracts of all the talks given at the Heidelberg meeting, as well as the notes on Coleman integration and on Grothendieck's fundamental group with a view towards anabelian geometry taken from a series of introductory lectures given by Amnon Besser and Tamas Szamuely, respectively."

Lagrangian systems constitute a very important and old class in dynamics. Their origin dates back to the end of the eighteenth century, with Joseph-Louis Lagrange s reformulation of classical mechanics. The main feature of Lagrangian dynamics is its variational flavor: orbits are extremal points of an action functional. The development of critical point theory in the twentieth century provided a powerful machinery to investigate existence and multiplicity questions for orbits of Lagrangian systems. This monograph gives a modern account of the application of critical point theory, and more specifically Morse theory, to Lagrangian dynamics, with particular emphasis toward existence and multiplicity of periodic orbits of non-autonomous and time-periodic systems."

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.

The theory of D-modules deals with the algebraic aspects of differential equations. These are particularly interesting on homogeneous manifolds, since the infinitesimal action of a Lie algebra consists of differential operators. Hence, it is possible to attach geometric invariants, like the support and the characteristic variety, to representations of Lie groups. By considering D-modules on flag varieties, one obtains a simple classification of all irreducible admissible representations of reductive Lie groups. On the other hand, it is natural to study the representations realized by functions on pseudo-Riemannian symmetric spaces, i.e., spherical representations. The problem is then to describe the spherical representations among all irreducible ones, and to compute their multiplicities. This is the goal of this work, achieved fairly completely at least for the discrete series representations of reductive symmetric spaces. The book provides a general introduction to the theory of D-modules on flag varieties, and it describes spherical D-modules in terms of a cohomological formula. Using microlocalization of representations, the author derives a criterion for irreducibility. The relation between multiplicities and singularities is also discussed at length.

Originally published in 1990.

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