The present volume grew out of an international conference on affine algebraic geometry held in Osaka, Japan during 3-6 March 2011 and is dedicated to Professor Masayoshi Miyanishi on the occasion of his 70th birthday. It contains 16 refereed articles in the areas of affine algebraic geometry, commutative algebra and related fields, which have been the working fields of Professor Miyanishi for almost 50 years. Readers will be able to find recent trends in these areas too. The topics contain both algebraic and analytic, as well as both affine and projective, problems. All the results treated in this volume are new and original which subsequently will provide fresh research problems to explore. This volume is suitable for graduate students and researchers in these areas.

This proceedings volume gathers selected, peer-reviewed works presented at the Polynomial Rings and Affine Algebraic Geometry Conference, which was held at Tokyo Metropolitan University on February 12-16, 2018. Readers will find some of the latest research conducted by an international group of experts on affine and projective algebraic geometry. The topics covered include group actions and linearization, automorphism groups and their structure as infinite-dimensional varieties, invariant theory, the Cancellation Problem, the Embedding Problem, Mathieu spaces and the Jacobian Conjecture, the Dolgachev-Weisfeiler Conjecture, classification of curves and surfaces, real forms of complex varieties, and questions of rationality, unirationality, and birationality. These papers will be of interest to all researchers and graduate students working in the fields of affine and projective algebraic geometry, as well as on certain aspects of commutative algebra, Lie theory, symplectic geometry and Stein manifolds.

The main focus of this volume is on the problem of describing the automorphism groups of affine and projective varieties, a classical subject in algebraic geometry where, in both cases, the automorphism group is often infinite dimensional. The collection covers a wide range of topics and is intended for researchers in the fields of classical algebraic geometry and birational geometry (Cremona groups) as well as affine geometry with an emphasis on algebraic group actions and automorphism groups. It presents original research and surveys and provides a valuable overview of the current state of the art in these topics. Bringing together specialists from projective, birational algebraic geometry and affine and complex algebraic geometry, including Mori theory and algebraic group actions, this book is the result of ensuing talks and discussions from the conference “Groups of Automorphisms in Birational and Affine Geometry” held in October 2012, at the CIRM, Levico Terme, Italy. The talks at the conference highlighted the close connections between the above-mentioned areas and promoted the exchange of knowledge and methods from adjacent fields.

This book explores the theory and application of locally nilpotent derivations, a subject motivated by questions in affine algebraic geometry and having fundamental connections to areas such as commutative algebra, representation theory, Lie algebras and differential equations. The author provides a unified treatment of the subject, beginning with 16 First Principles on which the theory is based. These are used to establish classical results, such as Rentschler's Theorem for the plane and the Cancellation Theorem for Curves. More recent results, such as Makar-Limanov's theorem for locally nilpotent derivations of polynomial rings, are also discussed. Topics of special interest include progress in classifying additive actions on three-dimensional affine space, finiteness questions (Hilbert's 14th Problem), algorithms, the Makar-Limanov invariant, and connections to the Cancellation Problem and the Embedding Problem. A lot of new material is included in this expanded second edition, such as canonical factorization of quotient morphisms, and a more extended treatment of linear actions. The reader will also find a wealth of examples and open problems and an updated resource for future investigations.

Covering topics in algebraic geometry, coding theory, and cryptography, this volume presents interdisciplinary group research completed for the February 2016 conference at the Institute for Pure and Applied Mathematics (IPAM) in cooperation with the Association for Women in Mathematics (AWM). The conference gathered research communities across disciplines to share ideas and problems in their fields and formed small research groups made up of graduate students, postdoctoral researchers, junior faculty, and group leaders who designed and led the projects. Peer reviewed and revised, each of this volume's five papers achieves the conference’s goal of using algebraic geometry to address a problem in either coding theory or cryptography. Proposed variants of the McEliece cryptosystem based on different constructions of codes, constructions of locally recoverable codes from algebraic curves and surfaces, and algebraic approaches to the multicast network coding problem are only some of the topics covered in this volume. Researchers and graduate-level students interested in the interactions between algebraic geometry and both coding theory and cryptography will find this volume valuable.

A Special Session on affine and algebraic geometry took place at the first joint meeting between the American Mathematical Society (AMS) and the Real Sociedad Matematica Espanola (RSME) held in Seville (Spain). This volume contains articles by participating speakers at the Session. The book contains research and survey papers discussing recent progress on the Jacobian Conjecture and affine algebraic geometry and includes a large collection of open problems. It is suitable for graduate students and research mathematicians interested in algebraic geometry.

Over the last several decades there has been a renewed interest in finite field theory, partly as a result of important applications in a number of diverse areas such as electronic communications, coding theory, combinatorics, designs, finite geometries, cryptography, and other portions of discrete mathematics. In addition, a number of recent books have been devoted to the subject. Despite the resurgence in interest, it is not widely known that many results concerning finite fields have natural generalizations to abritrary algebraic extensions of finite fields. The purpose of this book is to describe these generalizations. After an introductory chapter surveying pertinent results about finite fields, the book describes the lattice structure of fields between the finite field $GF(q)$ and its algebraic closure $\Gamma (q)$. The authors introduce a notion, due to Steinitz, of an extended positive integer $N$ which includes each ordinary positive integer $n$ as a special case. With the aid of these Steinitz numbers, the algebraic extensions of $GF(q)$ are represented by symbols of the form $GF(q^N)$. When $N$ is an ordinary integer $n$, this notation agrees with the usual notation $GF(q^n)$ for a dimension $n$ extension of $GF(q)$. The authors then show that many of the finite field results concerning $GF(q^n)$ are also true for $GF(q^N)$. One chapter is devoted to giving explicit algorithms for computing in several of the infinite fields $GF(q^N)$ using the notion of an explicit basis for $GF(q^N)$ over $GF(q)$. Another chapter considers polynomials and polynomial-like functions on $GF(q^N)$ and contains a description of several classes of permutation polynomials, including the $q$-polynomials and the Dickson polynomials. Also included is a brief chapter describing two of many potential applications. Aimed at the level of a beginning graduate student or advanced undergraduate, this book could serve well as a supplementary text for a course in finite field theory.

Dedicated to the memory of the Soviet mathematician S D Berman (1922-1987), this work covers topics including Berman's achievements in coding theory, including his pioneering work on abelian codes and his results on the theory of threshold functions.