Books in the Annals of Mathematics Studies series

This is a study of the theory of models with truth values in a compact Hausdorff topological space.

William Thurston (1946ΓÇô2012) was one of the great mathematicians of the twentieth century. He was a visionary whose extraordinary ideas revolutionized a broad range of mathematical fields, from foliations, contact structures, and Teichm├╝ller theory to automorphisms of surfaces, hyperbolic geometry, geometrization of 3-manifolds, geometric group theory, and rational maps. In addition, he discovered connections between disciplines that led to astonishing breakthroughs in mathematical understanding as well as the creation of entirely new fields. His far-reaching questions and conjectures led to enormous progress by other researchers. What''s Next? brings together many of today''s leading mathematicians to describe recent advances and future directions inspired by Thurston''s transformative ideas.Including valuable insights from his colleagues and former students, What''s Next? discusses Thurston''s fundamental contributions to topology, geometry, and dynamical systems and includes many deep and original contributions to the field. This incisive and wide-ranging book also explores how he introduced new ways of thinking about and doing mathematics, innovations that have had a profound and lasting impact on the mathematical community as a whole.

The central theme of this study is Artin's braid group and the many ways that the notion of a braid has proved to be important in low-dimensional topology.In Chapter 1 the author is concerned with the concept of a braid as a group of motions of points in a manifold. She studies structural and algebraic properties of the braid groups of two manifolds, and derives systems of defining relations for the braid groups of the plane and sphere. In Chapter 2 she focuses on the connections between the classical braid group and the classical knot problem. After reviewing basic results she proceeds to an exploration of some possible implications of the Garside and Markov theorems.Chapter 3 offers discussion of matrix representations of the free group and of subgroups of the automorphism group of the free group. These ideas come to a focus in the difficult open question of whether Burau's matrix representation of the braid group is faithful. Chapter 4 is a broad view of recent results on the connections between braid groups and mapping class groups of surfaces. Chapter 5 contains a brief discussion of the theory of "e;plats."e; Research problems are included in an appendix.

The study of exponential sums over finite fields, begun by Gauss nearly two centuries ago, has been completely transformed in recent years by advances in algebraic geometry, culminating in Deligne's work on the Weil Conjectures. It now appears as a very attractive mixture of algebraic geometry, representation theory, and the sheaf-theoretic incarnations of such standard constructions of classical analysis as convolution and Fourier transform. The book is simultaneously an account of some of these ideas, techniques, and results, and an account of their application to concrete equidistribution questions concerning Kloosterman sums and Gauss sums.

On Knots is a journey through the theory of knots, starting from the simplest combinatorial ideas--ideas arising from the representation of weaving patterns. From this beginning, topological invariants are constructed directly: first linking numbers, then the Conway polynomial and skein theory. This paves the way for later discussion of the recently discovered Jones and generalized polynomials. The central chapter, Chapter Six, is a miscellany of topics and recreations. Here the reader will find the quaternions and the belt trick, a devilish rope trick, Alhambra mosaics, Fibonacci trees, the topology of DNA, and the author's geometric interpretation of the generalized Jones Polynomial.Then come branched covering spaces, the Alexander polynomial, signature theorems, the work of Casson and Gordon on slice knots, and a chapter on knots and algebraic singularities.The book concludes with an appendix about generalized polynomials.

In the earlier monograph Pseudo-reductive Groups, Brian Conrad, Ofer Gabber, and Gopal Prasad explored the general structure of pseudo-reductive groups. In this new book, Classification of Pseudo-reductive Groups, Conrad and Prasad go further to study the classification over an arbitrary field. An isomorphism theorem proved here determines the automorphism schemes of these groups. The book also gives a Tits-Witt type classification of isotropic groups and displays a cohomological obstruction to the existence of pseudo-split forms. Constructions based on regular degenerate quadratic forms and new techniques with central extensions provide insight into new phenomena in characteristic 2, which also leads to simplifications of the earlier work. A generalized standard construction is shown to account for all possibilities up to mild central extensions.The results and methods developed in Classification of Pseudo-reductive Groups will interest mathematicians and graduate students who work with algebraic groups in number theory and algebraic geometry in positive characteristic.

The description for this book, Advances in Game Theory. (AM-52), will be forthcoming.

The description for this book, Contributions to the Theory of Nonlinear Oscillations (AM-36), Volume III, will be forthcoming.

Written and revised by D. B. A. Epstein.

The description for this book, Contributions to the Theory of Nonlinear Oscillations (AM-20), Volume I, will be forthcoming.

Annals of Mathematics Studies: Number 41The present volume of the Contributions, fourth in the series, covers, like its predecessors, a great variety of topics in non-linear differential equations.

The description for this book, Contributions to the Theory of Nonlinear Oscillations (AM-45), Volume V, will be forthcoming.

The description for this book, Contributions to the Theory of Games (AM-24), Volume I, will be forthcoming.

These two new collections, numbers 28 and 29 respectively in the Annals of Mathematics Studies, continue the high standard set by the earlier Annals Studies 20 and 24 by bringing together important contributions to the theories of games and of nonlinear differential equations.

A new group of contributions to the development of this theory by leading experts in the field. The contributors include L. D. Berkovitz, L. E. Dubins, H. Everett, W. H. Fleming, D. Gale, D. Gillette, S. Karlin, J. G. Kemeny, R. Restrepo, H. E. Scarf, M. Sion, G. L. Thompson, P. Wolfe, and others.

The description for this book, Contributions to the Theory of Riemann Surfaces. (AM-30), will be forthcoming.

The description for this book, Flows on Homogeneous Spaces. (AM-53), Volume 53, will be forthcoming.

The description for this book, Introduction to Non-Linear Mechanics. (AM-11), Volume 11, will be forthcoming.

The description for this book, Linear Inequalities and Related Systems. (AM-38), Volume 38, will be forthcoming.

During the summer of 1965, an informal seminar in geometric topology was held at the University of Wisconsin under the direction of Professor Bing. Twenty-five of these lectures are included in this study, among them Professor Bing's lecture describing the recent attacks of Haken and Poincaré on the Poincaré conjectures, and sketching a proof of Haken's main result.