Bücher der Reihe Encyclopaedia of Mathematical Sciences

This two-part volume contains numerous examples and insights on various topics. The authors have taken pains to present the material rigorously and coherently. This book will be immensely useful to mathematicians and graduate students working in algebraic geometry, arithmetic algebraic geometry, complex analysis and related fields.

What is particularly pleasant is the fact that the authors are quite successful in giving to the reader the feeling behind the demonstrations which are sketched. This really enhances the value of this book and puts it at the level of a particularly interesting reference tool.

This up-to-date survey of the whole field of topology is the flagship of the topology subseries of the Encyclopaedia. The book gives an overview of various subfields, beginning with the elements and proceeding right up to the present frontiers of research.

The twentieth-century view of the analysis of functions is dominated by the study of classes of functions. This volume of the Encyclopaedia covers the origins, development and applications of linear functional analysis, explaining along the way how one is led naturally to the modern approach.

Fuchs, give an up-to-date account of research in central areas of topology and the theory of Lie groups. They cover homotopy, homology and cohomology as well as the theory of manifolds, Lie groups, Grassmanians and low-dimensional manifolds. Their book will be used by graduate students and researchers in mathematics and mathematical physics.

This book offers a comprehensive introduction to the general theory of C*-algebras and von Neumann algebras. Beginning with the basics, the theory is developed through such topics as tensor products, nuclearity and exactness, crossed products, K-theory, and quasidiagonality.

Most probability problems involve random variables indexed by space and/or time. These problems almost always have a version in which space and/or time are taken to be discrete. This volume deals with areas in which the discrete version is more natural than the continuous one, perhaps even the only one than can be formulated without complicated constructions and machinery. The 5 papers of this volume discuss problems in which there has been significant progress in the last few years; they are motivated by, or have been developed in parallel with, statistical physics. They include questions about asymptotic shape for stochastic growth models and for random clusters; existence, location and properties of phase transitions; speed of convergence to equilibrium in Markov chains, and in particular for Markov chains based on models with a phase transition; cut-off phenomena for random walks. The articles can be read independently of each other. Their unifying theme is that of models built on discrete spaces or graphs. Such models are often easy to formulate. Correspondingly, the book requires comparatively little previous knowledge of the machinery of probability.

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.

The original version of this article was written more than fiveyears ago with S. Z. Shefel',a profound and original mathematician who died in 1984. Sincethen the geometry of surfaces has continued to be enriched with ideas and results. This has required changes and additions, but has not influenced the character of the article, the design ofwhich originated with Shefel'. Without knowing to what extent Shefel' would have approved the changes, I should nevertheless like to dedicate this article to his memory. (Yu. D. Burago) We are trying to state the qualitative questions of the theory of surfaces in Euclidean spaces in the form in which they appear to the authors at present. This description does not entirely correspond to the historical development of the subject. The theory of surfaces was developed in the first place mainly as the 3 theory of surfaces in three-dimensional Euclidean space E ; however, it makes sense to begin by considering surfaces F in Euclidean spaces of any dimension n~ 3. This approach enables us, in particular, to put in a new light some 3 unsolved problems of this developed (and in the case of surfaces in E fairly complete) theory, and in many cases to refer to the connections with the present stage ofdevelopment of the theory of multidimensional submanifolds. The leading question of the article is the problem of the connection between classes of metrics and classes of surfaces in En.