Jon F. Carlson - Böcker

This text offers comprehensive coverage of group cohomology, from introductory material through the most recent developments in the field. The primary motivation for the book is the interaction of group cohomology with representation theory, especially the geometry of support varieties over cohomology rings. The appendices, comprising computer calculations of the mod-2 cohomology rings of the groups whose orders divide 64, provide information useful for further developments in the field. A feature of this text is that it includes the concepts that are the subject of the calculations and are the source of some of the motivating conjectures for the computations. The programs for computing the cohomology rings were executed in the MAGMA computer algebra language. The text is a useful resource for researchers in group cohomology and related disciplines. In addition, it could be used as a text for an advanced graduate class or a graduate seminar.

The second was a combination of a summer school and workshop on the subject of "Geometric Methods in the Representation Theory of Finite Groups" and took place at the Pacific Institute for the Mathematical Sciences at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver from July 27 to August 5, 2016.

The second was a combination of a summer school and workshop on the subject of "Geometric Methods in the Representation Theory of Finite Groups" and took place at the Pacific Institute for the Mathematical Sciences at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver from July 27 to August 5, 2016.

The notes in this volume were written as a part of a Nachdiplom course that I gave at the ETH in the summer semester of 1995. The aim of my lectures was the development of some of the basics of the interaction of homological algebra, or more specifically the cohomology of groups, and modular representation theory. Every time that I had given such a course in the past fifteen years, the choice of the material and the order of presentation of the results have followed more or less the same basic pattern. Such a course began with the fundamentals of group cohomology, and then investigated the structure of cohomology rings, and their maximal ideal spectra. Then the variety of a module was defined and related to actual module structure through the rank variety. Applications followed. The standard approach was used in my University of Essen Lecture Notes [e1] in 1984. Evens [E] and Benson [B2] have written it up in much clearer detail and included it as part of their books on the subject.