Author : Cameron Gordon
Publisher : American Mathematical Soc.
Page : 538 pages
File Size : 27,74 MB
Release : 1984
Category : Mathematics
ISBN : 0821850334
Covers the proceedings of the Summer Research Conference on 4-manifolds held at Durham, New Hampshire, July 1982, under the auspices of the American Mathematical Society and National Science Foundation.
Author : Alexandru Scorpan
Publisher : American Mathematical Soc.
Page : 642 pages
File Size : 20,73 MB
Release : 2005-05-10
Category : Mathematics
ISBN : 0821837494
What a wonderful book! I strongly recommend this book to anyone, especially graduate students, interested in getting a sense of 4-manifolds. --MAA Reviews The book gives an excellent overview of 4-manifolds, with many figures and historical notes. Graduate students, nonexperts, and experts alike will enjoy browsing through it. -- Robion C. Kirby, University of California, Berkeley This book offers a panorama of the topology of simply connected smooth manifolds of dimension four. Dimension four is unlike any other dimension; it is large enough to have room for wild things to happen, but small enough so that there is no room to undo the wildness. For example, only manifolds of dimension four can exhibit infinitely many distinct smooth structures. Indeed, their topology remains the least understood today. To put things in context, the book starts with a survey of higher dimensions and of topological 4-manifolds. In the second part, the main invariant of a 4-manifold--the intersection form--and its interaction with the topology of the manifold are investigated. In the third part, as an important source of examples, complex surfaces are reviewed. In the final fourth part of the book, gauge theory is presented; this differential-geometric method has brought to light how unwieldy smooth 4-manifolds truly are, and while bringing new insights, has raised more questions than answers. The structure of the book is modular, organized into a main track of about two hundred pages, augmented by extensive notes at the end of each chapter, where many extra details, proofs and developments are presented. To help the reader, the text is peppered with over 250 illustrations and has an extensive index.
Author : Robert Friedman
Publisher : American Mathematical Soc.
Page : 233 pages
File Size : 27,99 MB
Release : 1998
Category : Mathematics
ISBN : 0821805916
This text is part of the IAS/Park City Mathematics series and focuses on gauge theory and the topology of four-manifolds.
Author : S. K. Donaldson
Publisher : Oxford University Press
Page : 464 pages
File Size : 47,58 MB
Release : 1997
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN : 9780198502692
This text provides an accessible account to the modern study of the geometry of four-manifolds. Prerequisites are a firm grounding in differential topology and geometry, as may be gained from the first year of a graduate course.
Author : Jose Labastida
Publisher : Springer Science & Business Media
Page : 235 pages
File Size : 47,58 MB
Release : 2007-07-18
Category : Science
ISBN : 1402031777
The emergence of topological quantum ?eld theory has been one of the most important breakthroughs which have occurred in the context of ma- ematical physics in the last century, a century characterizedbyindependent developments of the main ideas in both disciplines, physics and mathematics, which has concluded with two decades of strong interaction between them, where physics, as in previous centuries, has acted as a source of new mat- matics. Topological quantum ?eld theories constitute the core of these p- nomena, although the main drivingforce behind it has been the enormous e?ort made in theoretical particle physics to understand string theory as a theory able to unify the four fundamental interactions observed in nature. These theories set up a new realm where both disciplines pro?t from each other. Although the most striking results have appeared on the mathema- calside,theoreticalphysicshasclearlyalsobene?tted,sincethecorresponding developments have helped better to understand aspects of the fundamentals of ?eld and string theory.
Author : Robert E. Gompf
Publisher : American Mathematical Soc.
Page : 576 pages
File Size : 42,29 MB
Release : 1999
Category : Mathematics
ISBN : 0821809946
Presents an exposition of Kirby calculus, or handle body theory on 4-manifolds. This book includes such topics as branched coverings and the geography of complex surfaces, elliptic and Lefschetz fibrations, $h$-cobordisms, symplectic 4-manifolds, and Stein surfaces.
Author : Daniel S. Freed
Publisher : Springer Science & Business Media
Page : 212 pages
File Size : 40,62 MB
Release : 2012-12-06
Category : Mathematics
ISBN : 1461397030
From the reviews of the first edition: "This book exposes the beautiful confluence of deep techniques and ideas from mathematical physics and the topological study of the differentiable structure of compact four-dimensional manifolds, compact spaces locally modeled on the world in which we live and operate... The book is filled with insightful remarks, proofs, and contributions that have never before appeared in print. For anyone attempting to understand the work of Donaldson and the applications of gauge theories to four-dimensional topology, the book is a must." #Science#1 "I would strongly advise the graduate student or working mathematician who wishes to learn the analytic aspects of this subject to begin with Freed and Uhlenbeck's book." #Bulletin of the American Mathematical Society#2
Author : Robion C. Kirby
Publisher : Springer
Page : 114 pages
File Size : 47,79 MB
Release : 2006-11-14
Category : Mathematics
ISBN : 354046171X
This book presents the classical theorems about simply connected smooth 4-manifolds: intersection forms and homotopy type, oriented and spin bordism, the index theorem, Wall's diffeomorphisms and h-cobordism, and Rohlin's theorem. Most of the proofs are new or are returbishings of post proofs; all are geometric and make us of handlebody theory. There is a new proof of Rohlin's theorem using spin structures. There is an introduction to Casson handles and Freedman's work including a chapter of unpublished proofs on exotic R4's. The reader needs an understanding of smooth manifolds and characteristic classes in low dimensions. The book should be useful to beginning researchers in 4-manifolds.
Author : Robert Friedman
Publisher : Springer Science & Business Media
Page : 532 pages
File Size : 10,75 MB
Release : 2013-03-09
Category : Mathematics
ISBN : 3662030284
In 1961 Smale established the generalized Poincare Conjecture in dimensions greater than or equal to 5 [129] and proceeded to prove the h-cobordism theorem [130]. This result inaugurated a major effort to classify all possible smooth and topological structures on manifolds of dimension at least 5. By the mid 1970's the main outlines of this theory were complete, and explicit answers (especially concerning simply connected manifolds) as well as general qualitative results had been obtained. As an example of such a qualitative result, a closed, simply connected manifold of dimension 2: 5 is determined up to finitely many diffeomorphism possibilities by its homotopy type and its Pontrjagin classes. There are similar results for self-diffeomorphisms, which, at least in the simply connected case, say that the group of self-diffeomorphisms of a closed manifold M of dimension at least 5 is commensurate with an arithmetic subgroup of the linear algebraic group of all automorphisms of its so-called rational minimal model which preserve the Pontrjagin classes [131]. Once the high dimensional theory was in good shape, attention shifted to the remaining, and seemingly exceptional, dimensions 3 and 4. The theory behind the results for manifolds of dimension at least 5 does not carryover to manifolds of these low dimensions, essentially because there is no longer enough room to maneuver. Thus new ideas are necessary to study manifolds of these "low" dimensions.
Author : Michael H. Freedman
Publisher : Princeton University Press
Page : 268 pages
File Size : 42,93 MB
Release : 2014-07-14
Category : Mathematics
ISBN : 1400861063
One of the great achievements of contemporary mathematics is the new understanding of four dimensions. Michael Freedman and Frank Quinn have been the principals in the geometric and topological development of this subject, proving the Poincar and Annulus conjectures respectively. Recognition for this work includes the award of the Fields Medal of the International Congress of Mathematicians to Freedman in 1986. In Topology of 4-Manifolds these authors have collaborated to give a complete and accessible account of the current state of knowledge in this field. The basic material has been considerably simplified from the original publications, and should be accessible to most graduate students. The advanced material goes well beyond the literature; nearly one-third of the book is new. This work is indispensable for any topologist whose work includes four dimensions. It is a valuable reference for geometers and physicists who need an awareness of the topological side of the field. Originally published in 1990. The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.
