This volume includes both survey and research articles on major advances and future developments in geometry and topology. Papers include those presented as part of the 5th Aarhus Conference - a meeting of international participants held in connection with ICM Berlin in 1998 - and related papers on the subject. This collection of papers is aptly published in the Contemporary Mathematics series, as the works represent the state of research and address areas of future development in the area of manifold theory and geometry. The survey articles in particular would serve well as supplemental resources in related graduate courses.
Geometric Topology is a foundational component of modern mathematics, involving the study of spacial properties and invariants of familiar objects such as manifolds and complexes. This volume, which is intended both as an introduction to the subject and as a wide ranging resouce for those already grounded in it, consists of 21 expository surveys written by leading experts and covering active areas of current research. They provide the reader with an up-to-date overview of this flourishing branch of mathematics.
The Geometry and Topology of Coxeter Groups is a comprehensive and authoritative treatment of Coxeter groups from the viewpoint of geometric group theory. Groups generated by reflections are ubiquitous in mathematics, and there are classical examples of reflection groups in spherical, Euclidean, and hyperbolic geometry. Any Coxeter group can be realized as a group generated by reflection on a certain contractible cell complex, and this complex is the principal subject of this book. The book explains a theorem of Moussong that demonstrates that a polyhedral metric on this cell complex is nonpositively curved, meaning that Coxeter groups are "CAT(0) groups." The book describes the reflection group trick, one of the most potent sources of examples of aspherical manifolds. And the book discusses many important topics in geometric group theory and topology, including Hopf's theory of ends; contractible manifolds and homology spheres; the Poincaré Conjecture; and Gromov's theory of CAT(0) spaces and groups. Finally, the book examines connections between Coxeter groups and some of topology's most famous open problems concerning aspherical manifolds, such as the Euler Characteristic Conjecture and the Borel and Singer conjectures.
This book presents articles at the interface of two active areas of research: classical topology and the relatively new field of geometric group theory. It includes two long survey articles, one on proofs of the Farrell–Jones conjectures, and the other on ends of spaces and groups. In 2010–2011, Ohio State University (OSU) hosted a special year in topology and geometric group theory. Over the course of the year, there were seminars, workshops, short weekend conferences, and a major conference out of which this book resulted. Four other research articles complement these surveys, making this book ideal for graduate students and established mathematicians interested in entering this area of research.
This volume is based on a conference held at SUNY, Stony Brook (NY). The concepts of laminations and foliations appear in a diverse number of fields, such as topology, geometry, analytic differential equations, holomorphic dynamics, and renormalization theory. Although these areas have developed deep relations, each has developed distinct research fields with little interaction among practitioners. The conference brought together the diverse points of view of researchers from different areas. This book includes surveys and research papers reflecting the broad spectrum of themes presented at the event. Of particular interest are the articles by F. Bonahon, "Geodesic Laminations on Surfaces", and D. Gabai, "Three Lectures on Foliations and Laminations on 3-manifolds", which are based on minicourses that took place during the conference.
The original zeta function was studied by Riemann as part of his investigation of the distribution of prime numbers. Other sorts of zeta functions were defined for number-theoretic purposes, such as the study of primes in arithmetic progressions. This led to the development of $L$-functions, which now have several guises. It eventually became clear that the basic construction used for number-theoretic zeta functions can also be used in other settings, such as dynamics, geometry, and spectral theory, with remarkable results. This volume grew out of the special session on dynamical, spectral, and arithmetic zeta functions held at the annual meeting of the American Mathematical Society in San Antonio, but also includes four articles that were invited to be part of the collection. The purpose of the meeting was to bring together leading researchers, to find links and analogies between their fields, and to explore new methods. The papers discuss dynamical systems, spectral geometry on hyperbolic manifolds, trace formulas in geometry and in arithmetic, as well as computational work on the Riemann zeta function. Each article employs techniques of zeta functions. The book unifies the application of these techniques in spectral geometry, fractal geometry, and number theory. It is a comprehensive volume, offering up-to-date research. It should be useful to both graduate students and confirmed researchers.
The Białowieża workshops on Geometric Methods in Physics, taking place in the unique environment of the Białowieża natural forest in Poland, are among the important meetings in the field. Every year some 80 to 100 participants both from mathematics and physics join to discuss new developments and to interchange ideas. The current volume was produced on the occasion of the XXXI meeting in 2012. For the first time the workshop was followed by a School on Geometry and Physics, which consisted of advanced lectures for graduate students and young researchers. Selected speakers of the workshop were asked to contribute, and additional review articles were added. The selection shows that despite its now long tradition the workshop remains always at the cutting edge of ongoing research. The XXXI workshop had as a special topic the works of the late Boris Vasilievich Fedosov (1938–2011) who is best known for a simple and very natural construction of a deformation quantization for any symplectic manifold, and for his contributions to index theory.
A survey of the areas where combinatorial methods have proven especially fruitful: topology and combinatorial group theory, knot theory, 3-manifolds, homotopy theory and infinite dimensional topology, and four manifolds and algebraic surfaces.
For the second time, a Summer School in Analysis and Mathematical Physics took place at the Universidad Nacional Autonoma de Mexico in Cuernavaca. The purpose of the schools is to provide a bridge from standard graduate courses in mathematics to current research topics, particularly in analysis. The lectures are given by internationally recognized specialists in the fields. The topics covered in this Second Summer School include harmonic analysis, complex analysis, pseudodifferential operators, the mathematics of quantum chaos, and non-linear analysis.
