Written in an accessible and informal style, this textbook is designed to give graduate students an understanding of integrable systems via the study of Riemann surfaces, loop groups, and twistors. The book has its origins in a series of lecture courses given by the authors, all internationally known mathematicians and renowned expositors. The introduction by Nigel Hitchin addresses the meaning of integrability: how do we recognize an integrable system? His own contribution then develops connections with algebraic geometry, and includes an introduction to Riemann surfaces, sheaves, and line bundles.

This textbook is designed to give graduate students an understanding of integrable systems via the study of Riemann surfaces, loop groups, and twistors. The book has its origins in a series of lecture courses given by the authors, all of whom are internationally known mathematicians and renowned expositors. It is written in an accessible and informal style, and fills a gap in the existing literature. The introduction by Nigel Hitchin addresses the meaning of integrability: how do we recognize an integrable system? His own contribution then develops connections with algebraic geometry, and includes an introduction to Riemann surfaces, sheaves, and line bundles. Graeme Segal takes the Kortewegde Vries and nonlinear Schroedinger equations as central examples, and explores the mathematical structures underlying the inverse scattering transform. He explains the roles of loop groups, the Grassmannian, and algebraic curves. In the final part of the book, Richard Ward explores the connection between integrability and the self-dual Yang-Mills equations, and describes the correspondence between solutions to integrable equations and holomorphic vector bundles over twistor space.

This volume contains the proceedings of a summer school presented by the Centro Internazionale Matematico Estivo, held at Montecatini Terme, Italy, in July 1988. This summer programme was devoted to methods of global differential geometry and algebraic geometry in field theory, with the main emphasis on istantons, vortices and other similar structures in gauge theories; Riemann surfaces and conformal field theories; geometry of supermanifolds and applications to physics. The papers are mainly surveys and tutorials.

Successive waves of migrant concepts, largely from mathematical physics, have stimulated the study of vector bundles over algebraic varieties in the past few years. But the subject has retained its roots in old questions concerning subvarieties of projective space. The 1993 Durham Symposium on vector bundles in algebraic geometry brought together some of the leading researchers in the field to further explore these interactions. This book is a collection of survey articles by the main speakers at the Symposium and presents to the mathematical world an overview of the key areas of research involving vector bundles. Topics include augmented bundles and coherent systems which link gauge theory and geometric invariant theory; Donaldson invariants of algebraic surfaces; Floer homology and quantum cohomology; conformal field theory and the moduli spaces of bundles on curves; the Horrocks-Mumford bundle and codimension 2 subvarieties in p4 and p5; and exceptional bundles and stable sheaves on projective space. This book will appeal greatly to mathematicians working in algebraic geometry and areas adjoining mathematical physics.