This work gives a coherent introduction to isoperimetric inequalities in Riemannian manifolds, featuring many of the results obtained during the last 25 years and discussing different techniques in the area. Written in a clear and appealing style, the book includes sufficient introductory material, making it also accessible to graduate students. It will be of interest to researchers working on geometric inequalities either from a geometric or analytic point of view, but also to those interested in applying the described techniques to their field.

This book deals with the geometrical structure of finite dimensional normed spaces, as the dimension grows to infinity. This is a part of what came to be known as the Local Theory of Banach Spaces (this name was derived from the fact that in its first stages, this theory dealt mainly with relating the structure of infinite dimensional Banach spaces to the structure of their lattice of finite dimensional subspaces). Our purpose in this book is to introduce the reader to some of the results, problems, and mainly methods developed in the Local Theory, in the last few years. This by no means is a complete survey of this wide area. Some of the main topics we do not discuss here are mentioned in the Notes and Remarks section. Several books appeared recently or are going to appear shortly, which cover much of the material not covered in this book. Among these are Pisier's [Pis6] where factorization theorems related to Grothendieck's theorem are extensively discussed, and Tomczak-Jaegermann's [T-Jl] where operator ideals and distances between finite dimensional normed spaces are studied in detail. Another related book is Pietch's [Pie].

This advanced introduction emphasizes the variety of ideas, techniques, and applications of the subject.

The contributions in this volume are dedicated to Vladimir G. Maz'ya and are par tially based on talks given at the conference "Functional Analysis, Partial Differ ential Equations, and Applications", which took place at the University of Rostock from August 31 to September 4, 1998, to honour Prof. Maz'ya. This conference (a satellite meeting of the ICM) gave an opportunity to many friends and colleagues from all over the world to honour him. This academic community is very large. The scientific field of Prof. Maz'ya is impressively broad, which is reflected in the variety of contributions included in the volumes. Vladimir Maz'ya is the author and co-author of many publications (see the list of publications at the end of this volume), the topics of which extend from functional analysis, function theory and numerical analysis to partial differential equations and their broad applications. Vladimir G. Maz'ya provided significant contributions, among others to the the ory of Sobolev spaces, the capacity theory, boundary integral methods, qualitative and asymptotic methods of analysis of linear and nonlinear elliptic differential equations, the Cauchy problem for elliptic and hyperbolic equations, the theory of multipliers in spaces of differentiable functions, maximum principles for elliptic and parabolic systems, and boundary value problems in domains with piecewise smooth boundaries. Surveys on Maz'ya's work in different fields of mathematics and areas, where he made essential contributions, form a major part of the present first volume of The Maz'ya Anniversary Collection.

Geometric flows have many applications in physics and geometry. The mean curvature flow occurs in the description of the interface evolution in certain physical models. This is related to the property that such a flow is the gradient flow of the area functional and therefore appears naturally in problems where a surface energy is minimized. The mean curvature flow also has many geometric applications, in analogy with the Ricci flow of metrics on abstract riemannian manifolds. One can use this flow as a tool to obtain classification results for surfaces satisfying certain curvature conditions, as well as to construct minimal surfaces. Geometric flows, obtained from solutions of geometric parabolic equations, can be considered as an alternative tool to prove isoperimetric inequalities. On the other hand, isoperimetric inequalities can help in treating several aspects of convergence of these flows. Isoperimetric inequalities have many applications in other fields of geometry, like hyperbolic manifolds.

Vol. 1200 of the LNM series deals with the geometrical structure of finite dimensional normed spaces. One of the main topics is the estimation of the dimensions of euclidean and l^n p spaces which nicely embed into diverse finite-dimensional normed spaces. An essential method here is the concentration of measure phenomenon which is closely related to large deviation inequalities in Probability on the one hand, and to isoperimetric inequalities in Geometry on the other. The book contains also an appendix, written by M. Gromov, which is an introduction to isoperimetric inequalities on riemannian manifolds. Only basic knowledge of Functional Analysis and Probability is expected of the reader. The book can be used (and was used by the authors) as a text for a first or second graduate course. The methods used here have been useful also in areas other than Functional Analysis (notably, Combinatorics).

This book gives an up-to-date account of progress on Pansu's celebrated problem on the sub-Riemannian isoperimetric profile of the Heisenberg group. It also serves as an introduction to the general field of sub-Riemannian geometric analysis. It develops the methods and tools of sub-Riemannian differential geometry, nonsmooth analysis, and geometric measure theory suitable for attacks on Pansu's problem.