The school, the book This book is based on lectures given by the authors of the various chapters in a three week long CIMPA summer school, held in Sophia-Antipolis (near Nice) in July 1992. The first week was devoted to the basics of symplectic and Riemannian geometry (Banyaga, Audin, Lafontaine, Gauduchon), the second was the technical one (Pansu, Muller, Duval, Lalonde and Sikorav). The final week saw the conclusion ofthe school (mainly McDuffand Polterovich, with complementary lectures by Lafontaine, Audin and Sikorav). Globally, the chapters here reflect what happened there. Locally, we have tried to reorganise some ofthe material to make the book more coherent. Hence, for instance, the collective (Audin, Lalonde, Polterovich) chapter on Lagrangian submanifolds and the appendices added to some of the chapters. Duval was not able to write up his lectures, so that genuine complex analysis will not appear in the book, although it is a very current tool in symplectic and contact geometry (and conversely). Hamiltonian systems and variational methods were the subject of some of Sikorav's talks, which he also was not able to write up. On the other hand, F.Labourie, who could not be at the school, wrote a chapter on pseudo-holomorphic curves in Riemannian geometry.
