From the reviews: "… focused mainly on complex differential geometry and holomorphic bundle theory. This is a powerful book, written by a very distinguished contributor to the field" (Contemporary Physics )"the book provides a large amount of background for current research across a spectrum of field. … requires effort to read but it is worthwhile and rewarding" (New Zealand Math. Soc. Newsletter) " The contents are highly technical and the pace of the exposition is quite fast. Manin is an outstanding mathematician, and writer as well, perfectly at ease in the most abstract and complex situation. With such a guide the reader will be generously rewarded!" (Physicalia) This new edition includes an Appendix on developments of the last 10 years, by S. Merkulov.

Everything the Power of the World does is done in a circle. The sky is round and I have heard that the earth is round like a ball and so are all the stars. The wind, in its greatest power, whirls. Birds make their nests in circles, for theirs is the same religion as ours. The sun comes forth and goes down again in a circle. The moon does the same and both are round. Even the seasons form a great circle in their changing and always come back again to where they were. The life of a man is a circle from childhood to childhood. And so it is everything where power moves. Black Elk (1863–1950) Nonlinearity is a captivating manifestation of the observable Universe, whose importance has increased over the decades, and has found more and more ?elds of application ranging from elementary particles, nuclear physics, biology, wave dynamics at any scale, ?uids, plasmas to astrophysics. The central character of this 172-year-old story is the soliton. Namely, a localized pulse traveling without spreading and having particle-like properties plus an in?nite number of conservation laws associated to its dynamics. In general, solitons arise as exact solutions of approximative models. There are di?- ent explanation, at di?erent levels, for the existence of solitons. From the experimentalist point of view, solitons can be created if the propagation c- ?gurationislongenough,narrowenough(likelongandshallowchannels,?ber optics, electric lines, etc.

From the reviews:
"…, the book must be of great help for a researcher who already has some idea of Lie theory, wants to employ it in his everyday research and/or teaching, and needs a source for customary reference on the subject. From my viewpoint, the volume is perfectly fit to serve as such a source, … On the whole, it is quite a pleasure, after making yourself comfortable in that favourite office armchair of yours, just to keep the volume gently in your hands and browse it slowly and thoughtfully; and after all, what more on Earth can one expect of any book?"

The original Russian edition of this book is the fifth in my series "Lectures on Geometry. " Therefore, to make the presentation relatively independent and self-contained in the English translation, I have added supplementary chapters in a special addendum (Chaps. 3Q-36), in which the necessary facts from manifold theory and vector bundle theory are briefly summarized without proofs as a rule. In the original edition, the book is divided not into chapters but into lec­ tures. This is explained by its origin as classroom lectures that I gave. The principal distinction between chapters and lectures is that the material of each chapter should be complete to a certain extent and the length of chapters can differ, while, in contrast, all lectures should be approximately the same in length and the topic of any lecture can change suddenly in the middle. For the series "Encyclopedia of Mathematical Sciences," the origin of a book has no significance, and the name "chapter" is more usual. Therefore, the name of subdivisions was changed in the translation, although no structural surgery was performed. I have also added a brief bibliography, which was absent in the original edition. The first ten chapters are devoted to the geometry of affine connection spaces. In the first chapter, I present the main properties of geodesics in these spaces. Chapter 2 is devoted to the formalism of covariant derivatives, torsion tensor, and curvature tensor. The major part of Chap.

In this part, we present a survey of mean-periodicity phenomena which arise in connection with classical questions in complex analysis, partial differential equations, and more generally, convolution equations. A common feature of the problem we shall consider is the fact that their solutions depend on tech­ niques and ideas from complex analysis. One finds in this way a remarkable and fruitful interplay between mean-periodicity and complex analysis. This is exactly what this part will try to explore. It is probably appropriate to stress the classical flavor of all of our treat­ ment. Even though we shall frequently refer to recent results and the latest theories (such as algebmic analysis, or the theory of Bernstein-Sato polyno­ mials), it is important to observe that the roots of probably all the problems we discuss here are classical in spirit, since that is the approach we use. For instance, most of Chap. 2 is devoted to far-reaching generalizations of a result dating back to Euler, and it is soon discovered that the key tool for such gen­ eralizations was first introduced by Jacobi! As the reader will soon discover, similar arguments can be made for each of the subsequent chapters. Before we give a complete description of our work on a chapter-by-chapter basis, let us make a remark about the list of references. It is quite hard (maybe even impossible) to provide a complete list of references on such a vast topic.

This is the second volume of the new subseries "Invariant Theory and Algebraic Transformation Groups". The aim of the survey by A. Bialynicki-Birula is to present the main trends and achievements of research in the theory of quotients by actions of algebraic groups. This theory contains geometric invariant theory with various applications to problems of moduli theory. The contribution by J. Carrell treats the subject of torus actions on algebraic varieties, giving a detailed exposition of many of the cohomological results one obtains from having a torus action with fixed points. Many examples, such as toric varieties and flag varieties, are discussed in detail. W.M. McGovern studies the actions of a semisimple Lie or algebraic group on its Lie algebra via the adjoint action and on itself via conjugation. His contribution focuses primarily on nilpotent orbits that have found the widest application to representation theory in the last thirty-five years.

This volume is devoted to the "hyperbolic theory" of dynamical systems (DS), that is, the theory of smooth DS's with hyperbolic behaviour of the tra­ jectories (generally speaking, not the individual trajectories, but trajectories filling out more or less "significant" subsets in the phase space. Hyperbolicity the property that under a small displacement of any of a trajectory consists in point of it to one side of the trajectory, the change with time of the relative positions of the original and displaced points resulting from the action of the DS is reminiscent of the mot ion next to a saddle. If there are "sufficiently many" such trajectories and the phase space is compact, then although they "tend to diverge from one another" as it were, they "have nowhere to go" and their behaviour acquires a complicated intricate character. (In the physical literature one often talks about "chaos" in such situations. ) This type of be­ haviour would appear to be the opposite of the more customary and simple type of behaviour characterized by its own kind of stability and regularity of the motions (these words are for the moment not being used as a strict ter­ 1 minology but rather as descriptive informal terms). The ergodic properties of DS's with hyperbolic behaviour of trajectories (Bunimovich et al. 1985) have already been considered in Volume 2 of this series. In this volume we therefore consider mainly the properties of a topological character (see below 2 for further details).

This book is devoted to the development of geometrie methods for studying and revealing geometrie aspects of the theory of differential equations with quadratie right-hand sides (Riccati-type equations), which are closely related to the calculus of variations and optimal control theory. The book contains the following three parts, to each of which aseparate book could be devoted: 1. the classieal calculus of variations and the geometrie theory of the Riccati equation (Chaps. 1-5), 2. complex Riccati equations as flows on Cartan-Siegel homogeneity da­ mains (Chap. 6), and 3. the minimization problem for multiple integrals and Riccati partial dif­ ferential equations (Chaps. 7 and 8). Chapters 1-4 are mainly auxiliary. To make the presentation complete and self-contained, I here review the standard facts (needed in what folIows) from the calculus of variations, Lie groups and algebras, and the geometry of Grass­ mann and Lagrange-Grassmann manifolds. When choosing these facts, I pre­ fer to present not the most general but the simplest assertions. Moreover, I try to organize the presentation so that it is not obscured by formal and technical details and, at the same time, is sufficiently precise. Other chapters contain my results concerning the matrix double ratio, com­ plex Riccati equations, and also the Riccati partial differential equation, whieh the minimization problem for a multiple integral. arises in The book is based on a course of lectures given in the Department of Me­ and Mathematics of Moscow State University during several years.

of Fourier series. For an inhomogeneous string it becomes necessary to con- sider the general Sturm-Liouville problem, whieh is the eigenvalue problem for a simple one-dimensional differential operator with variable coefficients. Failing to be explicitly soluble, the problem calls for a qualitative and asymp- totic study (see Egorov and Shubin 1988a, §9). When considering the vibra- tions of a membrane or a three-dimensional elastie body, we arrive at the eigenvalue problems for many-dimensional differential operators. Such prob- lems also arise in the theory of shells, hydrodynamies, and other areas of mechanies. One of the riehest sources of problems in spectral theory, mostly for Schrödinger operators, is quantum mechanies, in whieh the eigenvalues of the quantum Hamiltonian, and, more generally, the points of the spectrum of the Hamiltonian, are the possible energy values of the system.

These are the proceedings of the conference Interesting Algebraic Varieties Arising in Algebraic Transformation Groups Theory that was held at The Erwin Schrödinger International Institute for Mathematical Physics, Vienna, Austria, from October 22 through October 26, 2001.

This 4-th edition of the leading reference volume on distance metrics is characterized by updated and rewritten sections on some items suggested by experts and readers, as well a general streamlining of content and the addition of essential new topics. Though the structure remains unchanged, the new edition also explores recent advances in the use of distances and metrics for e.g. generalized distances, probability theory, graph theory, coding theory, data analysis.