Generalized Heisenberg groups, or H-type groups, introduced by A. Kaplan, and Damek-Ricci harmonic spaces are particularly nice Lie groups with a vast spectrum of properties and applications. These harmonic spaces are homogeneous Hadamard manifolds containing the H-type groups as horospheres.
These notes contain a thorough study of their Riemannian geometry by means of a detailed treatment of their Jacobi vector fields and Jacobi operators. Some problems are included and will hopefully stimulate further research on these spaces. The book is written for students and researchers, assuming only basic knowledge of Riemannian geometry, and it contains a brief survey of the background material needed to follow the entire treatment.

Geometric Topology can be defined to be the investigation of global properties of a further structure (e.g. differentiable, Riemannian, complex, algebraic etc.) one can impose on a topological manifold. At the C.I.M.E. session in Montecatini, in 1990, three courses of lectures were given onrecent developments in this subject which is nowadays emerging as one of themost fascinating and promising fields of contemporary mathematics. The notesof these courses are collected in this volume and can be described as: 1) the geometry and the rigidity of discrete subgroups in Lie groups especially in the case of lattices in semi-simple groups; 2) the study of the critical points of the distance function and its appication to the understanding of the topology of Riemannian manifolds; 3) the theory of moduli space of instantons as a tool for studying the geometry of low-dimensional manifolds. CONTENTS: J. Cheeger: Critical Points of Distance Functions and Applications to Geometry.- M. Gromov, P. Pansu, Rigidity of Lattices: An Introduction.- Chr. Okonek: Instanton Invariants and Algebraic Surfaces.

This volume contains the courses and lectures given during the workshop on Differential Geometry and Topology held at Alghero, Italy, in June 1992.The main goal of this meeting was to offer an introduction in attractive areas of current research and to discuss some recent important achievements in both the fields. This is reflected in the present book which contains some introductory texts together with more specialized contributions.The topics covered in this volume include circle and sphere packings, 3-manifolds invariants and combinatorial presentations of manifolds, soliton theory and its applications in differential geometry, G-manifolds of low cohomogeneity, exotic differentiable structures on R4, conformal deformation of Riemannian manifolds and Riemannian geometry of algebraic manifolds.