With the groundwork laid in the first volume (EMS 15) of the Commutative Harmonic Analysis subseries of the Encyclopaedia, the present volume takes up four advanced topics in the subject: Littlewood-Paley theory for singular integrals, exceptional sets, multiple Fourier series and multiple Fourier integrals.

Classical harmonic analysis is an important part of modern physics and mathematics, comparable in its significance with calculus. Created in the 18th and 19th centuries as a distinct mathematical discipline it continued to develop, conquering new unexpected areas and producing impressive applications to a multitude of problems. It is widely understood that the explanation of this miraculous power stems from group theoretic ideas underlying practically everything in harmonic analysis. This book is an unusual combination of the general and abstract group theoretic approach with a wealth of very concrete topics attractive to everybody interested in mathematics. Mathematical literature on harmonic analysis abounds in books of more or less abstract or concrete kind, but the lucky combination as in this volume can hardly be found.

This volume of the EMS contains three articles, on linear overdetermined systems of partial differential equations, dissipative Schroedinger operators, and index theorems. Each article presents a comprehensive survey of its subject, discussing fundamental results such as the construction of compatibility operators and complexes for elliptic, parabolic and hyperbolic coercive problems, the method of functional models and the Atiyah-Singer index theorem and its generalisations. Both classical and recent results are explained in detail and illustrated by means of examples.

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).

Annotation All the papers in this volume are research papers presenting new results. Most of the results concern semi-simple Lie groups and non-Riemannian symmetric spaces: unitarisation, discrete series characters, multiplicities, orbital integrals. Some, however, also apply to related fields such as Dirac operators and characters in the general case.

Two general questions regarding partial differential equations are explored in detail in this volume of the Encyclopaedia. The first is the Cauchy problem, and its attendant question of well-posedness (or correctness). The authors address this question in the context of PDEs with constant coefficients and more general convolution equations in the first two chapters. The third chapter extends a number of these results to equations with variable coefficients. The second topic is the qualitative theory of second order linear PDEs, in particular, elliptic and parabolic equations. Thus, the second part of the book is primarily a look at the behavior of solutions of these equations. There are versions of the maximum principle, the Phragmen-Lindel]f theorem and Harnack's inequality discussed for both elliptic and parabolic equations. The book is intended for readers who are already familiar with the basic material in the theory of partial differential equations.

An appendix sketching the recent impressive developments in the theory of knots and links and low-dimensional topology generally, brings the survey right up to the present. This work represents the flagship, as it were, in whose wake follow more detailed surveys of the various subfields, by various authors.