Victor Guillemin - Böcker

Differential Topology provides an elementary and intuitive introduction to the study of smooth manifolds. In the years since its first publication, Guillemin and Pollack's book has become a standard text on the subject. It is a jewel of mathematical exposition, judiciously picking exactly the right mixture of detail and generality to display the richness within. The text is mostly self-contained, requiring only undergraduate analysis and linear algebra. By relying on a unifying idea-transversality-the authors are able to avoid the use of big machinery or ad hoc techniques to establish the main results. In this way, they present intelligent treatments of important theorems, such as the Lefschetz fixed-point theorem, the Poincare-Hopf index theorem, and Stokes theorem. The book has a wealth of exercises of various types. Some are routine explorations of the main material. In others, the students are guided step-by-step through proofs of fundamental results, such as the Jordan-Brouwer separation theorem. An exercise section in Chapter 4 leads the student through a construction of de Rham cohomology and a proof of its homotopy invariance. The book is suitable for either an introductory graduate course or an advanced undergraduate course.

Multiplicity diagrams can be viewed as schemes for describing the phenomenon of 'symmetry breaking' in quantum physics. The subject of this book is the multiplicity diagrams associated with the classical groups U(n), O(n), etc. It presents such topics as asymptotic distributions of multiplicities, hierarchical patterns in multiplicity diagrams, lacanae, and the multiplicity diagrams of the rank 2 and rank 3 groups. The authors take a novel approach, using the techniques of symplectic geometry. The book develops in detail some themes which were touched on in the highly successful Symplectic Techniques in Physics by V. Guillemin and S. Sternberg, including the geometry of the moment map, the Duistermaat-Heckman theorem, the interplay between coadjoint orbits and representation theory, and quantization. Students and researchers in geometry and mathematical physics will find this book fascinating.

Symplectic geometry is very useful for clearly and concisely formulating problems in classical physics and also for understanding the link between classical problems and their quantum counterparts. It is thus a subject of interest to both mathematicians and physicists, though they have approached the subject from different view points. This is the first book that attempts to reconcile these approaches. The authors use the uncluttered, coordinate-free approach to symplectic geometry and classical mechanics that has been developed by mathematicians over the course of the last thirty years, but at the same time apply the apparatus to a great number of concrete problems. In the first chapter, the authors provide an elementary introduction to symplectic geometry and explain the key concepts and results in a way accessible to physicists and mathematicians. The remainder of the book is devoted to the detailed analysis and study of the ideas discussed in Chapter 1. Some of the themes emphasized in the book include the pivotal role of completely integrable systems, the importance of symmetries, analogies between classical dynamics and optics, the importance of symplectic tools in classical variational theory, symplectic features of classical field theories, and the principle of general covariance. This work can be used as a textbook for graduate courses, but the depth of coverage and the wealth of information and application means that it will be of continuing interest to, and of lasting significance for mathematicians and mathematically minded physicists.

Multiplicity diagrams can be viewed as schemes for describing the phenomenon of 'symmetry breaking' in quantum physics. The subject of this book is the multiplicity diagrams associated with the classical groups U(n), O(n), etc. It presents such topics as asymptotic distributions of multiplicities, hierarchical patterns in multiplicity diagrams, lacanae, and the multiplicity diagrams of the rank 2 and rank 3 groups. The authors take a novel approach, using the techniques of symplectic geometry. The book develops in detail some themes which were touched on in the highly successful Symplectic Techniques in Physics by V. Guillemin and S. Sternberg, including the geometry of the moment map, the Duistermaat-Heckman theorem, the interplay between coadjoint orbits and representation theory, and quantization. Students and researchers in geometry and mathematical physics will find this book fascinating.

Based on a seminar sponsored by the Institute for Advanced Study in 1977-1978, this set of papers introduces micro-local analysis concisely and clearly to mathematicians with an analytical background. The papers treat the theory of microfunctions and applications such as boundary values of elliptic partial differential equations, propagation of singularities in the vicinity of degenerate characteristics, holonomic systems, Feynman integrals from the hyperfunction point of view, and harmonic analysis on Lie groups.

The theory of Toeplitz operators has come to resemble more and more in recent years the classical theory of pseudodifferential operators. For instance, Toeplitz operators possess a symbolic calculus analogous to the usual symbolic calculus, and by symbolic means one can construct parametrices for Toeplitz operators and create new Toeplitz operators out of old ones by functional operations. If P is a self-adjoint pseudodifferential operator on a compact manifold with an elliptic symbol that is of order greater than zero, then it has a discrete spectrum. Also, it is well known that the asymptotic behavior of its eigenvalues is closely related to the behavior of the bicharacteristic flow generated by its symbol. It is natural to ask if similar results are true for Toeplitz operators. In the course of answering this question, the authors explore in depth the analogies between Toeplitz operators and pseudodifferential operators and show that both can be viewed as the "quantized" objects associated with functions on compact contact manifolds.

The subject matter of this work is an area of Lorentzian geometry which has not been heretofore much investigated: Do there exist Lorentzian manifolds all of whose light-like geodesics are periodic? A surprising fact is that such manifolds exist in abundance in (2 + 1)-dimensions (though in higher dimensions they are quite rare). This book is concerned with the deformation theory of M2,1 (which furnishes almost all the known examples of these objects). It also has a section describing conformal invariants of these objects, the most interesting being the determinant of a two dimensional "Floquet operator," invented by Paneitz and Segal.

This volume, dedicated to Bertram Kostant on the occasion of his 65th birthday, is a collection of 22 invited papers by leading mathematicians working in Lie theory, geometry, algebra, and mathematical physics. Kostant's fundamental work in all these areas has provided deep new insights and connections, and has created new fields of research. The papers gathered here present original research articles as well as expository papers, broadly reflecting the range of Kostant's work.

The action of a compact Lie group, G, on a compact symplectic manifold gives rise to some remarkable combinatorial invariants. The simplest and most interesting of these is the moment polytope, a convex polyhedron which sits inside the dual of the Lie algebra of G. One of the main goals of this monograph is to describe what kinds of geometric information are encoded in this polytope. For instance, the first chapter is largely devoted to the Delzant theorem, which says that there is a one-one correspondence between certain types of moment polytope and certain types of symplectic G-spaces. (One of the most challenging unsolved problems in symplectic geometry is to determine to what extent Delzant's theorem is true of every compact symplectic G-space.) The moment polytope also encodes quantum information about the action of G. Using the methods of geometric quantization, one can frequently convert this action into a representation, p, of G on a Hilbert space, and in some sense the moment polytope is a diagramatic picture of the irreducible representations of G which occur as subrepresentations of p. Precise versions of this item of folklore are discussed in Chapters 3 and 4.Also, midway through Chapter 2 a more complicated object is discussed: the Duistermaat-Heckman measure, and the author explains in Chapter 4 how one can read off from this measure the approximate multiplicities with which the irreducible representations of G occur in p. This gives an excuse to touch on some results which are in themselves of great current interest: the Duistermaat-Heckman theorem, the localization theorems in equivariant cobomology of Atiyah-Bott and Berline-Vergne and the recent extremely exciting generalizations of these results by Witten, Jeffrey-Kirwan, Kalkman, and others. The last two chapters of this book are a self-contained treatment of the theory of toric varieties in which the usual hierarchal relation of complex to symplectic is reversed. This book is addressed to researchers and can be used as a semester text.

"!the text is user friendly to the topics it considers and should be very accessible!Instructors and students of statistical measure theoretic courses will appreciate the numerous informative exercises; helpful hints or solution outlines are given with many of the problems. All in all, the text should make a useful reference for professionals and students."--The Journal of the American Statistical Association

This volume, dedicated to Bertram Kostant on the occasion of his 65th birthday, is a collection of 22 invited papers by leading mathematicians working in Lie theory, geometry, algebra, and mathematical physics. Kostant's fundamental work in all these areas has provided deep new insights and connections, and has created new fields of research. The papers gathered here present original research articles as well as expository papers, broadly reflecting the range of Kostant's work.

The action of a compact Lie group, G, on a compact sympletic manifold gives rise to some remarkable combinatorial invariants. The simplest and most interesting of these is the moment polytope, a convex polyhedron which sits inside the dual of the Lie algebra of G. One of the main goals of this monograph is to describe what kinds of geometric information are encoded in this polytope. For instance, the first chapter is largely devoted to the Delzant theorem, which says that there is a one-one correspondence between certain types of moment polytopes and certain types of symplectic G-spaces. (One of the most challenging unsolved problems in symplectic geometry is to determine to what extent Delzant’s theorem is true of every compact symplectic G-Space.)The moment polytope also encodes quantum information about the actions of G. Using the methods of geometric quantization, one can frequently convert this action into a representations, p , of G on a Hilbert space, and in some sense the moment polytope is a diagrammatic picture of the irreducible representations of G which occur as subrepresentations of p. Precise versions of this item of folklore are discussed in Chapters 3 and 4. Also, midway through Chapter 2 a more complicated object is discussed: the Duistermaat-Heckman measure, and the author explains in Chapter 4 how one can read off from this measure the approximate multiplicities with which the irreducible representations of G occur in p. This gives an excuse to touch on some results which are in themselves of great current interest: the Duistermaat-Heckman theorem, the localization theorems in equivariant cohomology of Atiyah-Bott and Berline-Vergne and the recent extremely exciting generalizations of these results by Witten, Jeffrey-Kirwan, Lalkman, and others.The last two chapters of this book are a self-contained and somewhat unorthodoxtreatment of the theory of toric varieties in which the usual hierarchal relation of complex to symplectic is reversed. This book is addressed to researchers

"Guillemin and Haine’s goal is to construct a well-documented road map that extends undergraduate understanding of multivariable calculus into the theory of differential forms. Throughout, the authors emphasize connections between differential forms and topology while making connections to single and multivariable calculus via the change of variables formula, vector space duals, physics; classical mechanisms, div, curl, grad, Brouwer’s fixed-point theorem, divergence theorem, and Stokes’s theorem … The exercises support, apply and justify the developing road map."CHOICEThere already exist a number of excellent graduate textbooks on the theory of differential forms as well as a handful of very good undergraduate textbooks on multivariable calculus in which this subject is briefly touched upon but not elaborated on enough.The goal of this textbook is to be readable and usable for undergraduates. It is entirely devoted to the subject of differential forms and explores a lot of its important ramifications.In particular, our book provides a detailed and lucid account of a fundamental result in the theory of differential forms which is, as a rule, not touched upon in undergraduate texts: the isomorphism between the Čech cohomology groups of a differential manifold and its de Rham cohomology groups.