Eduard Zehnder - Böcker

This book pioneers a nonlinear Fredholm theory in a general class of spaces called polyfolds.

The discoveries of the last decades have opened new perspectives for the old field of Hamiltonian systems and led to the creation of a new field: symplectic topology. Surprising rigidity phenomena demonstrate that the nature of symplectic mappings is very different from that of volume preserving mappings. This raises new questions, many of them still unanswered. On the other hand, analysis of an old variational principle in classical mechanics has established global periodic phenomena in Hamiltonian systems. As it turns out, these seemingly different phenomena are mysteriously related. One of the links is a class of symplectic invariants, called symplectic capacities. These invariants are the main theme of this book, which includes such topics as basic symplectic geometry, symplectic capacities and rigidity, periodic orbits for Hamiltonian systems and the action principle, a bi-invariant metric on the symplectic diffeomorphism group and its geometry, symplectic fixed point theory, the Arnold conjectures and first order elliptic systems, and finally a survey on Floer homology and symplectic homology. The exposition is self-contained and addressed to researchers and students from the graduate level onwards.

The discoveries of the past decade have opened new perspectives for the old field of Hamiltonian systems and led to the creation of a new field: symplectic topology. Surprising rigidity phenomena demonstrate that the nature of symplectic map­ pings is very different from that of volume preserving mappings which raised new questions, many of them still unanswered. On the other hand, due to the analysis of an old variational principle in classical mechanics, global periodic phenomena in Hamiltonian systems have been established. As it turns out, these seemingly differ­ ent phenomena are mysteriously related. One of the links is a class of symplectic invariants, called symplectic capacities. These invariants are the main theme of this book which grew out of lectures given by the authors at Rutgers University, the RUB Bochum and at the ETH Zurich (1991) and also at the Borel Seminar in Bern 1992. Since the lectures did not require any previous knowledge, only a few and rather elementary topics were selected and proved in detail. Moreover, our se­ lection has been prompted by a single principle: the action principle of mechanics. The action functional for loops in the phase space, given by 1 Fh) = J pdq -J H(t, 'Y(t)) dt , 'Y 0 differs from the old Hamiltonian principle in the configuration space defined by a Lagrangian. The critical points of F are those loops 'Y which solve the Hamiltonian equations associated with the Hamiltonian H and hence are the periodic orbits.

Andreas Floer died on May 15, 1991 an untimely and tragic death. His visions and far-reaching contributions have significantly influenced the developments of mathematics. His main interests centered on the fields of dynamical systems, symplectic geometry, Yang-Mills theory and low dimensional topology. Motivated by the global existence problem of periodic solutions for Hamiltonian systems and starting from ideas of Conley, Gromov and Witten, he developed his Floer homology, providing new, powerful methods which can be applied to problems inaccessible only a few years ago. This volume opens with a short biography and three hitherto unpublished papers of Andreas Floer. It then presents a collection of invited contributions, and survey articles as well as research papers on his fields of interest, bearing testimony of the high esteem and appreciation this brilliant mathematician enjoyed among his colleagues. Authors include: A. Floer, V.I. Arnold, M. Atiyah, M. Audin, D.M. Austin, S.M. Bates, P.J. Braam, M. Chaperon, R.L. Cohen, G. Dell' Antonio, S.K. Donaldson, B. D'Onofrio, I. Ekeland, Y. Eliashberg, K.D. Ernst, R. Finthushel, A.B. Givental, H. Hofer, J.D.S. Jones, I.McAllister, D. McDuff, Y.-G. Oh, L. Polterovich, D.A. Salamon, G.B. Segal, R. Stern, C.H. Taubes, C. Viterbo, A. Weinstein, E. Witten, E. Zehnder