Riccardo Benedetti - Böcker

This book gives a comprehensive introduction to the theory of smooth manifolds, maps, and fundamental associated structures with an emphasis on ``bare hands'' approaches, combining differential-topological cut-and-paste procedures and applications of transversality. In particular, the smooth cobordism cup-product is defined from scratch and used as the main tool in a variety of settings. After establishing the fundamentals, the book proceeds to a broad range of more advanced topics in differential topology, including degree theory, the Poincare-Hopf index theorem, bordism-characteristic numbers, and the Pontryagin-Thom construction. Cobordism intersection forms are used to classify compact surfaces; their quadratic enhancements are developed and applied to studying the homotopy groups of spheres, the bordism group of immersed surfaces in a 3-manifold, and congruences mod 16 for the signature of intersection forms of 4-manifolds. Other topics include the high-dimensional $h$-cobordism theorem stressing the role of the ``Whitney trick'', a determination of the singleton bordism modules in low dimensions, and proofs of parallelizability of orientable 3-manifolds and the Lickorish-Wallace theorem. Nash manifolds and Nash's questions on the existence of real algebraic models are also discussed. This book will be useful as a textbook for beginning masters and doctoral students interested in differential topology, who have finished a standard undergraduate mathematics curriculum. It emphasizes an active learning approach, and exercises are included within the text as part of the flow of ideas. Experienced readers may use this book as a source of alternative, constructive approaches to results commonly presented in more advanced contexts with specialized techniques.

Presenting some impressive recent achievements in differential geometry and topology, this volume focuses on results obtained using techniques based on Ricci flow.

In recent years hyperbolic geometry has been the object and the preparation for extensive study that has produced important and often amazing results and also opened up new questions. The book concerns the geometry of manifolds and in particular hyperbolic manifolds; its aim is to provide an exposition of some fundamental results, and to be as far as possible self-contained, complete, detailed and unified. Since it starts from the basics and it reaches recent developments of the theory, the book is mainly addressed to graduate-level students approaching research, but it will also be a helpful and ready-to-use tool to the mature researcher. After collecting some classical material about the geometry of the hyperbolic space and the Teichmüller space, the book centers on the two fundamental results: Mostow's rigidity theorem (of which a complete proof is given following Gromov and Thurston) and Margulis' lemma. These results form the basis for the study of the space of the hyperbolic manifolds in all dimensions (Chabauty and geometric topology); a unified exposition is given of Wang's theorem and the Jorgensen-Thurston theory. A large part is devoted to the three-dimensional case: a complete and elementary proof of the hyperbolic surgery theorem is given based on the possibility of representing three manifolds as glued ideal tetrahedra. The last chapter deals with some related ideas and generalizations (bounded cohomology, flat fiber bundles, amenable groups). This is the first book to collect this material together from numerous scattered sources to give a detailed presentation at a unified level accessible to novice readers.