This book explores the theory and application of locally nilpotent derivations. It provides a unified treatment of the subject, beginning with sixteen First Principles on which the entire theory is based. These are used to establish classical results, such as Rentschler’s Theorem for the plane, right up to the most recent results, such as Makar-Limanov’s Theorem for locally nilpotent derivations of polynomial rings. The book also includes a wealth of pexamples and open problems.

This book is an expanded text for a graduate course in commutative algebra, focusing on the algebraic underpinnings of algebraic geometry and of number theory. Accordingly, the theory of affine algebras is featured, treated both directly and via the theory of Noetherian and Artinian modules, and the theory of graded algebras is included to provide the foundation for projective varieties. Major topics include the theory of modules over a principal ideal domain, and its applicationsto matrix theory (including the Jordan decomposition), the Galois theory of field extensions, transcendence degree, the prime spectrum of an algebra, localization, and the classical theory of Noetherian and Artinian rings. Later chapters include some algebraic theory of elliptic curves (featuring theMordell-Weil theorem) and valuation theory, including local fields. One feature of the book is an extension of the text through a series of appendices. This permits the inclusion of more advanced material, such as transcendental field extensions, the discriminant and resultant, the theory of Dedekind domains, and basic theorems of rings of algebraic integers. An extended appendix on derivations includes the Jacobian conjecture and Makar-Limanov's theory of locally nilpotent derivations. Grobnerbases can be found in another appendix. Exercises provide a further extension of the text. The book can be used both as a textbook and as a reference source.

Algebraic K-theory encodes important invariants for several mathematical disciplines, spanning from geometric topology and functional analysis to number theory and algebraic geometry. As is commonly encountered, this powerful mathematical object is very hard to calculate. Apart from Quillen's calculations of finite fields and Suslin's calculation of algebraically closed fields, few complete calculations were available before the discovery of homological invariants offered by motivic cohomology and topological cyclic homology. This book covers the connection between algebraic K-theory and Bökstedt, Hsiang and Madsen's topological cyclic homology and proves that the difference between the theories are ‘locally constant’. The usefulness of this theorem stems from being more accessible for calculations than K-theory, and hence a single calculation of K-theory can be used with homological calculations to obtain a host of ‘nearby’ calculations in K-theory. For instance, Quillen's calculation of the K-theory of finite fields gives rise to Hesselholt and Madsen's calculations for local fields, and Voevodsky's calculations for the integers give insight into the diffeomorphisms of manifolds. In addition to the proof of the full integral version of the local correspondence between K-theory and topological cyclic homology, the book provides an introduction to the necessary background in algebraic K-theory and highly structured homotopy theory; collecting all necessary tools into one common framework. It relies on simplicial techniques, and contains an appendix summarizing the methods widely used in the field. The book is intended for graduate students and scientists interested in algebraic K-theory, and presupposes a basic knowledge of algebraic topology.

Motivated by some notorious open problems, such as the Jacobian conjecture and the tame generators problem, the subject of polynomial automorphisms has become a rapidly growing field of interest. This book, the first in the field, collects many of the results scattered throughout the literature. It introduces the reader to a fascinating subject and brings him to the forefront of research in this area. Some of the topics treated are invertibility criteria, face polynomials, the tame generators problem, the cancellation problem, exotic spaces, DNA for polynomial automorphisms, the Abhyankar-Moh theorem, stabilization methods, dynamical systems, the Markus-Yamabe conjecture, group actions, Hilbert's 14th problem, various linearization problems and the Jacobian conjecture. The work is essentially self-contained and aimed at the level of beginning graduate students. Exercises are included at the end of each section. At the end of the book there are appendices to cover used material from algebra, algebraic geometry, D-modules and Gröbner basis theory. A long list of ''strong'' examples and an extensive bibliography conclude the book.

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.

Ideal for graduate students and researchers, this book presents a unified treatment of the central notions of integral closure.

In the fifth of his famous list of 23 problems, Hilbert asked if every topological group which was locally Euclidean was in fact a Lie group. Through the work of Gleason, Montgomery-Zippin, Yamabe, and others, this question was solved affirmatively; more generally, a satisfactory description of the (mesoscopic) structure of locally compact groups was established. Subsequently, this structure theory was used to prove Gromov's theorem on groups of polynomial growth, and more recently in the work of Hrushovski, Breuillard, Green, and the author on the structure of approximate groups. In this graduate text, all of this material is presented in a unified manner, starting with the analytic structural theory of real Lie groups and Lie algebras (emphasising the role of one-parameter groups and the Baker-Campbell-Hausdorff formula), then presenting a proof of the Gleason-Yamabe structure theorem for locally compact groups (emphasising the role of Gleason metrics), from which the solution to Hilbert's fifth problem follows as a corollary. After reviewing some model-theoretic preliminaries (most notably the theory of ultraproducts), the combinatorial applications of the Gleason-Yamabe theorem to approximate groups and groups of polynomial growth are then given. A large number of relevant exercises and other supplementary material are also provided.