Surgery theory, the basis for the classification theory of manifolds, is now about forty years old. The sixtieth birthday (on December 14, 1996) of C.T.C. Wall, a leading member of the subject's founding generation, led the editors of this volume to reflect on the extraordinary accomplishments of surgery theory as well as its current enormously varied interactions with algebra, analysis, and geometry. Workers in many of these areas have often lamented the lack of a single source surveying surgery theory and its applications. Because no one person could write such a survey, the editors asked a variety of experts to report on the areas of current interest. This is the second of two volumes resulting from that collective effort. It will be useful to topologists, to other interested researchers, and to advanced students. The topics covered include current applications of surgery, Wall's finiteness obstruction, algebraic surgery, automorphisms and embeddings of manifolds, surgery theoretic methods for the study of group actions and stratified spaces, metrics of positive scalar curvature, and surgery in dimension four. In addition to the editors, the contributors are S. Ferry, M. Weiss, B. Williams, T. Goodwillie, J. Klein, S. Weinberger, B. Hughes, S. Stolz, R. Kirby, L. Taylor, and F. Quinn.

Surgery theory, the basis for the classification theory of manifolds, is now about forty years old. There have been some extraordinary accomplishments in that time, which have led to enormously varied interactions with algebra, analysis, and geometry. Workers in many of these areas have often lamented the lack of a single source that surveys surgery theory and its applications. Indeed, no one person could write such a survey. The sixtieth birthday of C. T. C. Wall, one of the leaders of the founding generation of surgery theory, provided an opportunity to rectify the situation and produce a comprehensive book on the subject. Experts have written state-of-the-art reports that will be of broad interest to all those interested in topology, not only graduate students and mathematicians, but mathematical physicists as well. Contributors include J. Milnor, S. Novikov, W. Browder, T. Lance, E. Brown, M. Kreck, J. Klein, M. Davis, J. Davis, I. Hambleton, L. Taylor, C. Stark, E. Pedersen, W. Mio, J. Levine, K. Orr, J. Roe, J. Milgram, and C. Thomas.

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 manyexcellent talks delivered at the conference.

An infinite-dimensional manifold is a topological manifold modeled on some infinite-dimensional homogeneous space called a model space. In this book, the following spaces are considered model spaces: Hilbert space (or non-separable Hilbert spaces), the Hilbert cube, dense subspaces of Hilbert spaces being universal spaces for absolute Borel spaces, the direct limit of Euclidean spaces, and the direct limit of Hilbert cubes (which is homeomorphic to the dual of a separable infinite-dimensional Banach space with bounded weak-star topology). This book is designed for graduate students to acquire knowledge of fundamental results on infinite-dimensional manifolds and their characterizations. To read and understand this book, some background is required even for senior graduate students in topology, but that background knowledge is minimized and is listed in the first chapter so that references can easily be found. Almost all necessary background information is found in Geometric Aspects of General Topology, the author's first book. Many kinds of hyperspaces and function spaces are investigated in various branches of mathematics, which are mostly infinite-dimensional. Among them, many examples of infinite-dimensional manifolds have been found. For researchers studying such objects, this book will be very helpful. As outstanding applications of Hilbert cube manifolds, the book contains proofs of the topological invariance of Whitehead torsion and Borsuk’s conjecture on the homotopy type of compact ANRs. This is also the first book that presents combinatorial ∞-manifolds, the infinite-dimensional version of combinatorial n-manifolds, and proofs of two remarkable results, that is, any triangulation of each manifold modeled on the direct limit of Euclidean spaces is a combinatorial ∞-manifold and the Hauptvermutung for them is true.

Covering the years 2008-2012, this book profiles the life and work of recent winners of the Abel Prize: · John G. Thompson and Jacques Tits, 2008 · Mikhail Gromov, 2009 · John T. Tate Jr., 2010 · John W. Milnor, 2011 · Endre Szemerédi, 2012. The profiles feature autobiographical information as well as a description of each mathematician's work. In addition, each profile contains a complete bibliography, a curriculum vitae, as well as photos — old and new. As an added feature, interviews with the Laureates are presented on an accompanying web site (http://extras.springer.com/). The book also presents a history of the Abel Prize written by the historian Kim Helsvig, and includes a facsimile of a letter from Niels Henrik Abel, which is transcribed, translated into English, and placed into historical perspective by Christian Skau. This book follows on The Abel Prize: 2003-2007, The First Five Years (Springer, 2010), which profiles the work of the first Abel Prize winners.

Vols. for 1980- issued in three parts: Series, Authors, and Titles.

Issues for 1973- cover the entire IEEE technical literature.