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.

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.

Robert J. Zimmer is best known in mathematics for the highly influential conjectures and program that bear his name. Group Actions in Ergodic Theory, Geometry, and Topology: Selected Papers brings together some of the most significant writings by Zimmer, which lay out his program and contextualize his work over the course of his career. Zimmer’s body of work is remarkable in that it involves methods from a variety of mathematical disciplines, such as Lie theory, differential geometry, ergodic theory and dynamical systems, arithmetic groups, and topology, and at the same time offers a unifying perspective. After arriving at the University of Chicago in 1977, Zimmer extended his earlier research on ergodic group actions to prove his cocycle superrigidity theorem which proved to be a pivotal point in articulating and developing his program. Zimmer’s ideas opened the door to many others, and they continue to be actively employed in many domains related to group actions in ergodic theory, geometry, and topology. In addition to the selected papers themselves, this volume opens with a foreword by David Fisher, Alexander Lubotzky, and Gregory Margulis, as well as a substantial introductory essay by Zimmer recounting the course of his career in mathematics. The volume closes with an afterword by Fisher on the most recent developments around the Zimmer program.

This book presents the theory of optimal and critical regularities of groups of diffeomorphisms, from the classical work of Denjoy and Herman, up through recent advances. Beginning with an investigation of regularity phenomena for single diffeomorphisms, the book goes on to describes a circle of ideas surrounding Filipkiewicz's Theorem, which recovers the smooth structure of a manifold from its full diffeomorphism group. Topics covered include the simplicity of homeomorphism groups, differentiability of continuous Lie group actions, smooth conjugation of diffeomorphism groups, and the reconstruction of spaces from group actions. Various classical and modern tools are developed for controlling the dynamics of general finitely generated group actions on one-dimensional manifolds, subject to regularity bounds, including material on Thompson's group F, nilpotent groups, right-angled Artin groups, chain groups, finitely generated groups with prescribed critical regularities, and applications to foliation theory and the study of mapping class groups. The book will be of interest to researchers in geometric group theory.

This work studies equivariant linear second order elliptic operators [italic capital]P on a connected noncompact manifold [italic capital]X with a given action of a group [italic capital]G. The action is assumed to be cocompact, meaning that [italic capitals]GV = [italic capital]X for some compact subset of [italic capital]V of [italic capital]X. The aim is to study the structure of the convex cone of all positive solutions of [italic capital]P[italic]u = 0.

The problem that we are concerned with is the existence and construction of embeddings of a given G-CW complex (G-manifold) in another G-CW complex (G-manifold) having a prescribed homotopy type and a prescribed family of isotropy subgroups.

Author has written several excellent Springer books.; This book is a sequel to Introduction to Topological Manifolds; Careful and illuminating explanations, excellent diagrams and exemplary motivation; Includes short preliminary sections before each section explaining what is ahead and why

Differential geometry began as the study of curves and surfaces using the methods of calculus. This book offers a graduate-level introduction to the tools and structures of modern differential geometry. It includes the topics usually found in a course on differentiable manifolds, such as vector bundles, tensors, and de Rham cohomology.

This book contains expository papers that give an up-to-date account of recent developments and open problems in the geometry and topology of manifolds, along with several research articles that present new results appearing in published form for the first time. The unifying theme is the problem of understanding manifolds in low dimensions, notably in dimensions three and four, and the techniques include algebraic topology, surgery theory, Donaldson and Seiberg-Witten gauge theory, Heegaard Floer homology, contact and symplectic geometry, and Gromov-Witten invariants. The articles collected for this volume were contributed by participants of the Conference "Geometry and Topology of Manifolds" held at McMaster University on May 14-18, 2004 and are representative of the many excellent talks delivered at the conference.

During the last 20 years, ``localization'' has been one of the dominant themes in the area of equivariant differential geometry. Typical results are the Duistermaat-Heckman theory, the Berline-Vergne-Atiyah-Bott localization theorem in equivariant de Rham theory, and the ``quantization commutes with reduction'' theorem and its various corollaries. To formulate the idea that these theorems are all consequences of a single result involving equivariant cobordisms, the authors have developed a cobordism theory that allows the objects to be non-compact manifolds. A key ingredient in this non-compact cobordism is an equivariant-geometrical object which they call an ``abstract moment map''. This is a natural and important generalization of the notion of a moment map occurring in the theory of Hamiltonian dynamics. The book contains a number of appendices that include introductions to proper group-actions on manifolds, equivariant cohomology, Spin${^\mathrm{c}}$-structures, and stable complex structures. It is geared toward graduate students and research mathematicians interested in differential geometry. It is also suitable for topologists, Lie theorists, combinatorists, and theoretical physicists. Prerequisite is some expertise in calculus on manifolds and basic graduate-level differential geometry.