This book carefully presents a unified treatment of equivariant Poincaré duality in a wide variety of contexts, illuminating an area of mathematics that is often glossed over elsewhere. The approach used here allows the parallel treatment of both equivariant and nonequivariant cases. It also makes it possible to replace the usual field of coefficients for cohomology, the field of real numbers, with any field of arbitrary characteristic, and hence change (equivariant) de Rham cohomology to the usual singular (equivariant) cohomology . The book will be of interest to graduate students and researchers wanting to learn about the equivariant extension of tools familiar from non-equivariant differential geometry.

Filling a gap in the literature, this book takes the reader to the frontiers of equivariant topology, the study of objects with specified symmetries. The discussion is motivated by reference to a list of instructive “toy” examples and calculations in what is a relatively unexplored field. The authors also provide a reading path for the first-time reader less interested in working through sophisticated machinery but still desiring a rigorous understanding of the main concepts. The subject’s classical counterparts, ordinary homology and cohomology, dating back to the work of Henri Poincaré in topology, are calculational and theoretical tools which are important in many parts of mathematics and theoretical physics, particularly in the study of manifolds. Similarly powerful tools have been lacking, however, in the context of equivariant topology. Aimed at advanced graduate students and researchers in algebraic topology and related fields, the book assumes knowledge of basic algebraic topology and group actions.

This book is a foundational piece of work in stable homotopy theory and in the theory of transformation groups. It may be roughly divided into two parts. The first part deals with foundations of (equivariant) stable homotopy theory. A workable category of CW-spectra is developed. The foundations are such that an action of a compact Lie group is considered throughout, and spectra allow desuspension by arbitrary representations. But even if the reader forgets about group actions, he will find many details of the theory worked out for the first time. More subtle constructions like smash products, function spectra, change of group isomorphisms, fixed point and orbit spectra are treated. While it is impossible to survey properly the material which is covered in the book, it does boast these general features: (i) a thorough and reliable presentation of the foundations of the theory; (ii) a large number of basic results, principal applications, and fundamental techniques presented for the first time in a coherent theory, unifying numerous treatments of special cases in the literature.

This volume introduces equivariant homotopy, homology, and cohomology theory, along with various related topics in modern algebraic topology. It explains the main ideas behind some of the most striking recent advances in the subject. The works begins with a development of the equivariant algebraic topology of spaces culminating in a discussion of the Sullivan conjecture that emphasizes its relationship with classical Smith theory. The book then introduces equivariant stable homotopy theory, the equivariant stable homotopy category, and the most important examples of equivariant cohomology theories. The basic machinery that is needed to make serious use of equivariant stable homotopy theory is presented next, along with discussions of the Segal conjecture and generalized Tate cohomology. Finally, the book gives an introduction to "brave new algebra", the study of point-set level algebraic structures on spectra and its equivariant applications. Emphasis is placed on equivariant complex cobordism, and related results on that topic are presented in detail.

Presents an understanding of the sorts of problems one studies in group actions and the methods used to study such problems. This book features articles based upon lectures at the 1983 AMS-IMS-SIAM Joint Summer Research Conference, Group Actions on Manifolds, held at the University of Colorado.

This book discusses the equivariant cohomology theory of differentiable manifolds. Although this subject has gained great popularity since the early 1980's, it has not before been the subject of a monograph. It covers almost all important aspects of the subject The authors are key authorities in this field.

In this work we develop an equivariant Sullivan-Wall surgery exact sequence in the category of smooth and locally linear actions of finite groups which satisfy the gap hypothesis. We then apply this machinery to various problems of classifying group actions on manifolds.

This book develops rigorous foundations for parametrized homotopy theory, which is the algebraic topology of spaces and spectra that are continuously parametrized by the points of a base space. It also begins the systematic study of parametrized homology and cohomology theories. The parametrized world provides the natural home for many classical notions and results, such as orientation theory, the Thom isomorphism, Atiyah and Poincare duality, transfer maps, the Adams and Wirthmuller isomorphisms, and the Serre and Eilenberg-Moore spectral sequences. But in addition to providing a clearer conceptual outlook on these classical notions, it also provides powerful methods to study new phenomena, such as twisted $K$-theory, and to make new constructions, such as iterated Thom spectra. Duality theory in the parametrized setting is particularly illuminating and comes in two flavors. One allows the construction and analysis of transfer maps, and a quite different one relates parametrized homology to parametrized cohomology. The latter is based formally on a new theory of duality in symmetric bicategories that is of considerable independent interest. The text brings together many recent developments in homotopy theory. It provides a highly structured theory of parametrized spectra, and it extends parametrized homotopy theory to the equivariant setting. The theory of topological model categories is given a more thorough treatment than is available in the literature. This is used, together with an interesting blend of classical methods, to resolve basic foundational problems that have no nonparametrized counterparts.

This volume presents the proceedings of the Tel Aviv International Topology Conference held during the Special Topology Program at Tel Aviv University. The book is dedicated to Professor Mel Rothenberg on the occasion of his 65th birthday. His contributions to topology are well known-from the early work on triangulations to numerous papers on transformation groups and on geometric and analytic aspects of torsion theory. Current research related to those contributions are reported in this book. Coverage is included on the following topics: vanishing theorems for the Dirac operator, the theory of Reidemeister torsion (including infinite dimensional flat bundles), Nobikov-Shubin invariants of manifolds, topology of group actions, Lusternik-Schnirelman theory for closed 1-forms, finite type invariants of links and 3-manifolds, equivariant cobordisms, equivariant orientations and Thom isomorphisms, and more.

The equivariant derived category of sheaves is introduced. All usual functors on sheaves are extended to the equivariant situation. Some applications to the equivariant intersection cohomology are given. The theory may be useful to specialists in representation theory, algebraic geometry or topology.