This book is a collection of research articles in algebraic geometry and complex analysis dedicated to Hans Grauert. The authors and editors have made their best efforts in order that these contributions should be adequate to honour the outstanding scientist. The volume contains important new results, solutions to longstanding conjectures, elegant new proofs and new perspectives for future research. The topics range from surface theory and commutative algebra, linear systems, moduli spaces, classification theory, Kähler geometry to holomorphic dynamical systems.

These notes are based on the lectures I delivered at the German Mathematical Society Seminar in Schloss Michkeln in DUsseldorf in June. 1986 on Hermitian-Einstein metrics for stable bundles and Kahler-Einstein metrics. The purpose of these notes is to present to the reader the state-of-the-art results in the simplest and the most comprehensible form using (at least from my own subjective viewpoint) the most natural approach. The presentation in these notes is reasonably self-contained and prerequisi tes are kept to a minimum. Most steps in the estimates are reduced as much as possible to the most basic procedures such as integration by parts and the maximum principle. When less basic procedures are used such as the Sobolev and Calderon-Zygmund inequalities and the interior Schauder estimates. references are given for the reader to look them up. A considerable amount of heuristic and intuitive discussions are included to explain why certain steps are used or certain notions introduced. The inclusion of such discussions makes the style of the presentation at some places more conversational than what is usually expected of rigorous mathemtical prese"ntations. For the problems of Hermi tian-Einstein metrics for stable bundles and Kahler-Einstein metrics one can use either the continuity method or the heat equation method. These two methods are so very intimately related that in many cases the relationship betwen them borders on equivalence. What counts most is the a. priori estimates. The kind of scaffolding one hangs the a.

This volume contains a collection of research papers dedicated to Hans Grauert on the occasion of his seventieth birthday. Hans Grauert is a pioneer in modern complex analysis, continuing the il lustrious German tradition in function theory of several complex variables of Weierstrass, Behnke, Thullen, Stein, Siegel, and many others. When Grauert came on the scene in the early 1950's, function theory was going through a revolutionary period with the geometric theory of complex spaces still in its embryonic stage. A rich theory evolved with the joint efforts of many great mathematicians including Oka, Kodaira, Cartan, and Serre. The Car tan Seminar in Paris and the Kodaira Seminar provided important venues an for its development. Grauert, together with Andreotti and Remmert, took active part in the latter. In his career he has nurtured a great number of his own doctoral students as well as other young mathematicians in his field from allover the world. For a couple of decades his work blazed the trail and set the research agenda in several complex variables worldwide. Among his many fundamentally important contributions, which are too numerous to completely enumerate here, are: 1. The complete clarification of various notions of complex spaces. 2. The solution of the general Levi problem and his work on pseudo convexity for general manifolds. 3. The theory of exceptional analytic sets. 4. The Oka principle for holomorphic bundles. 5. The proof of the Mordell conjecture for function fields. 6. The direct image theorem for coherent sheaves."