This book contains several contributions on the most outstanding events in the development of twentieth century mathematics, representing a wide variety of specialities in which Russian and Soviet mathematicians played a considerable role. The articles are written in an informal style, from mathematical philosophy to the description of the development of ideas, personal memories and give a unique account of personal meetings with famous representatives of twentieth century mathematics who exerted great influence in its development.

This book will be of great interest to mathematicians, who will enjoy seeing their own specialities described with some historical perspective. Historians will read it with the same motive, and perhaps also to select topics for future investigation.

Vladimir Abramovich Rokhlin (8/23/1919-12/03/1984) was one of the leading Russian mathematicians of the second part of the twentieth century. His main achievements were in algebraic topology, real algebraic geometry, and ergodic theory. The volume contains the proceedings of the Conference on Topology, Geometry, and Dynamics: V. A. Rokhlin-Memorial, held from August 19-23, 2019, at The Euler International Mathematics Institute and the Steklov Institute of Mathematics, St. Petersburg, Russia. The articles deal with topology of manifolds, theory of cobordisms, knot theory, geometry of real algebraic manifolds and dynamical systems and related topics. The book also contains Rokhlin's biography supplemented with copies of actual very interesting documents.

At the Summer School Saint Petersburg 2001, the main lecture courses bore on recent progress in asymptotic representation theory: those written up for this volume deal with the theory of representations of infinite symmetric groups, and groups of infinite matrices over finite fields; Riemann-Hilbert problem techniques applied to the study of spectra of random matrices and asymptotics of Young diagrams with Plancherel measure; the corresponding central limit theorems; the combinatorics of modular curves and random trees with application to QFT; free probability and random matrices, and Hecke algebras.