This book deals with the role played by symmetry in the understanding of the physical world, beginning with the notion of geometric symmetries of the ancient Greek philosophers and mathematicians. The recognition of the existence of symmetries led to the notion of transformations, which led from one state of the system to another. It was then realized that such transformations, under the operation of multiplication, constitute an interesting set, whose study led to the branch of mathematics known as Group Theory. With the emergence of quantum mechanics, this theory became much more interesting and led to some additional applications. The theory got another boost with the need for of the internal degrees of freedom in describing physical systems. This way the notion of symmetry is no longer purely geometric and evolved into a useful tool in the study of all physical sciences.For practical reasons as well as pedagogical reasons, group theory is usually split into two parts. The first deals with discrete groups, with the group elements being countable, usually finite in number, while the second deals with continuous groups, whose elements depend on continuous parameters. This volumefocuses the discussion on discrete groups. Given that group theory should be presented from a unified perspective, involving not only the mathematical rigor and beauty of symmetries, but also the ability to use it as a tool for applications, either currently popular or expected to become so in the future, this approach will surely be more beneficial to the dedicated reader. It is not intended for those who would like to just look up a formula or use the results of a table, without understanding their derivation.

This volume consists of contributions by participants and speakers at two conferences. The first was entitled Combinatorial Group Theory, Discrete Groups and Number Theory and was held at Fairfield University, December 8-9, 2004. It was in honor of Professor Gerhard Rosenberger's sixtieth birthday. The second was the AMS Special Session on Infinite Group Theory held at Bard College, October 8-9, 2005. The papers in this volume provide a very interesting mix of combinatorial group theory, discrete group theory and ring theory as well as contributions to noncommutative algebraic cryptography.

In a self contained and exhaustive work the author covers Group Theory in its multifaceted aspects, treating its conceptual foundations in a proper logical order. First discrete and finite group theory, that includes the entire chemical-physical field of crystallography is developed self consistently, followed by the structural theory of Lie Algebras with a complete exposition of the roots and Dynkin diagrams lore. A primary on Fibre-Bundles, Connections and Gauge fields, Riemannian Geometry and the theory of Homogeneous Spaces G/H is also included and systematically developed.

The main topic of the book is amenable groups, i.e., groups on which there exist invariant finitely additive measures. It was discovered that the existence or non-existence of amenability is responsible for many interesting phenomena such as, e.g., the Banach-Tarski Paradox about breaking a sphere into two spheres of the same radius. Since then, amenability has been actively studied and a number of different approaches resulted in many examples of amenable and non-amenable groups. In the book, the author puts together main approaches to study amenability. A novel feature of the book is that the exposition of the material starts with examples which introduce a method rather than illustrating it. This allows the reader to quickly move on to meaningful material without learning and remembering a lot of additional definitions and preparatory results; those are presented after analyzing the main examples. The techniques that are used for proving amenability in this book are mainly a combination of analytic and probabilistic tools with geometric group theory.

This proceedings volume presents a diverse collection of high-quality, state-of-the-art research and survey articles written by top experts in low-dimensional topology and its applications. The focal topics include the wide range of historical and contemporary invariants of knots and links and related topics such as three- and four-dimensional manifolds, braids, virtual knot theory, quantum invariants, braids, skein modules and knot algebras, link homology, quandles and their homology; hyperbolic knots and geometric structures of three-dimensional manifolds; the mechanism of topological surgery in physical processes, knots in Nature in the sense of physical knots with applications to polymers, DNA enzyme mechanisms, and protein structure and function. The contents is based on contributions presented at the International Conference on Knots, Low-Dimensional Topology and Applications – Knots in Hellas 2016, which was held at the International Olympic Academy in Greece in July 2016. The goal of the international conference was to promote the exchange of methods and ideas across disciplines and generations, from graduate students to senior researchers, and to explore fundamental research problems in the broad fields of knot theory and low-dimensional topology. This book will benefit all researchers who wish to take their research in new directions, to learn about new tools and methods, and to discover relevant and recent literature for future study.

"It is a pleasure to turn to Wussing's book, a sound presentation of history," declared the Bulletin of the American Mathematical Society. The author, Director of the Institute for the History of Medicine and Science at Leipzig University, traces the axiomatic formulation of the abstract notion of group. 1984 edition.

A survey of one-relator products of cyclics or groups with a single defining relation, extending the algebraic study of Fuchsian groups to the more general context of one-relator products and related group theoretical considerations. It provides a self-contained account of certain natural generalizations of discrete groups.

In one guise or another, many mathematicians are familiar with certain arithmetic groups, such as $\mathbf{Z}$ or $\textrm{SL}(n, \mathbf{Z})$. Yet, many applications of arithmetic groups and many connections to other subjects within mathematics are less well known. Indeed, arithmetic groups admit many natural and important generalizations. The purpose of this expository book is to explain, through some brief and informal comments and extensive references, what arithmetic groups and their generalizations are, why they are important to study, and how they can be understood and applied to many fields, such as analysis, geometry, topology, number theory, representation theory, and algebraic geometry. It is hoped that such an overview will shed a light on the important role played by arithmetic groups in modern mathematics. Titles in this series are co-published with International Press, Cambridge, MA.Table of Contents: Introduction; General comments on references; Examples of basic arithmetic groups; General arithmetic subgroups and locally symmetric spaces; Discrete subgroups of Lie groups and arithmeticity of lattices in Lie groups; Different completions of $\mathbb{Q}$ and $S$-arithmetic groups over number fields; Global fields and $S$-arithmetic groups over function fields; Finiteness properties of arithmetic and $S$-arithmetic groups; Symmetric spaces, Bruhat-Tits buildings and their arithmetic quotients; Compactifications of locally symmetric spaces; Rigidity of locally symmetric spaces; Automorphic forms and automorphic representations for general arithmetic groups; Cohomology of arithmetic groups; $K$-groups of rings of integers and $K$-groups of group rings; Locally homogeneous manifolds and period domains; Non-cofinite discrete groups, geometrically finite groups; Large scale geometry of discrete groups; Tree lattices; Hyperbolic groups; Mapping class groups and outer automorphism groups of free groups; Outer automorphism group of free groups and the outer spaces; References; Index. Review from Mathematical Reviews: ...the author deserves credit for having done the tremendous job of encompassing every aspect of arithmetic groups visible in today's mathematics in a systematic manner; the book should be an important guide for some time to come.(AMSIP/43.

Details some of the most recent developments at the interface of topology and geometric group theory. Ideal for graduate students.

These lecture notes provide a tutorial review of non-Abelian discrete groups and show some applications to issues in physics where discrete symmetries constitute an important principle for model building in particle physics. While Abelian discrete symmetries are often imposed in order to control couplings for particle physics - in particular model building beyond the standard model - non-Abelian discrete symmetries have been applied to understand the three-generation flavor structure in particular. Indeed, non-Abelian discrete symmetries are considered to be the most attractive choice for the flavor sector: model builders have tried to derive experimental values of quark and lepton masses, and mixing angles by assuming non-Abelian discrete flavor symmetries of quarks and leptons, yet, lepton mixing has already been intensively discussed in this context, as well. The possible origins of the non-Abelian discrete symmetry for flavors is another topic of interest, as they can arise from an underlying theory - e.g. the string theory or compactification via orbifolding – thereby providing a possible bridge between the underlying theory and the corresponding low-energy sector of particle physics. This text explicitly introduces and studies the group-theoretical aspects of many concrete groups and shows how to derive conjugacy classes, characters, representations, and tensor products for these groups (with a finite number) when algebraic relations are given, thereby enabling readers to apply this to other groups of interest.