These volumes are the outgrowth of a conference held at the Mathematisches Forschungsinstitut Oberwolfach (Germany) on the subject of `Novikov conjectures, index theorems and rigidity'.

These lecture notes contain a guided tour to the Novikov Conjecture and related conjectures due to Baum-Connes, Borel and Farrell-Jones. They begin with basics about higher signatures, Whitehead torsion and the s-Cobordism Theorem. Then an introduction to surgery theory and a version of the assembly map is presented. Using the solution of the Novikov conjecture for special groups some applications to the classification of low dimensional manifolds are given.

This authoritative volume in honor of Alain Connes, the foremost architect of Noncommutative Geometry, presents the state-of-the art in the subject. The book features an amalgam of invited survey and research papers that will no doubt be accessed, read, and referred to, for several decades to come. The pertinence and potency of new concepts and methods are concretely illustrated in each contribution. Much of the content is a direct outgrowth of the Noncommutative Geometry conference, held March 23–April 7, 2017, in Shanghai, China. The conference covered the latest research and future areas of potential exploration surrounding topology and physics, number theory, as well as index theory and its ramifications in geometry.

Surgery theory, the basis for the classification theory of manifolds, is now about forty years old. The sixtieth birthday (on December 14, 1996) of C.T.C. Wall, a leading member of the subject's founding generation, led the editors of this volume to reflect on the extraordinary accomplishments of surgery theory as well as its current enormously varied interactions with algebra, analysis, and geometry. Workers in many of these areas have often lamented the lack of a single source surveying surgery theory and its applications. Because no one person could write such a survey, the editors asked a variety of experts to report on the areas of current interest. This is the second of two volumes resulting from that collective effort. It will be useful to topologists, to other interested researchers, and to advanced students. The topics covered include current applications of surgery, Wall's finiteness obstruction, algebraic surgery, automorphisms and embeddings of manifolds, surgery theoretic methods for the study of group actions and stratified spaces, metrics of positive scalar curvature, and surgery in dimension four. In addition to the editors, the contributors are S. Ferry, M. Weiss, B. Williams, T. Goodwillie, J. Klein, S. Weinberger, B. Hughes, S. Stolz, R. Kirby, L. Taylor, and F. Quinn.

In algebraic topology some classical invariants - such as Betti numbers and Reidemeister torsion - are defined for compact spaces and finite group actions. They can be generalized using von Neumann algebras and their traces, and applied also to non-compact spaces and infinite groups. These new L2-invariants contain very interesting and novel information and can be applied to problems arising in topology, K-Theory, differential geometry, non-commutative geometry and spectral theory. The book, written in an accessible manner, presents a comprehensive introduction to this area of research, as well as its most recent results and developments.

Noncommutative differential geometry has many actual and potential applications to several domains in physics ranging from solid state to quantization of gravity. The strategy is to formulate usual differential geometry in a somewhat unusual manner, using in particular operator algebras and related concepts, so as to be able to plug in noncommutativity in a natural way. Algebraic tools such as K-theory and cyclic cohomology and homology play an important role in this field.

Surgery theory, the basis for the classification theory of manifolds, is now about forty years old. There have been some extraordinary accomplishments in that time, which have led to enormously varied interactions with algebra, analysis, and geometry. Workers in many of these areas have often lamented the lack of a single source that surveys surgery theory and its applications. Indeed, no one person could write such a survey. The sixtieth birthday of C. T. C. Wall, one of the leaders of the founding generation of surgery theory, provided an opportunity to rectify the situation and produce a comprehensive book on the subject. Experts have written state-of-the-art reports that will be of broad interest to all those interested in topology, not only graduate students and mathematicians, but mathematical physicists as well. Contributors include J. Milnor, S. Novikov, W. Browder, T. Lance, E. Brown, M. Kreck, J. Klein, M. Davis, J. Davis, I. Hambleton, L. Taylor, C. Stark, E. Pedersen, W. Mio, J. Levine, K. Orr, J. Roe, J. Milgram, and C. Thomas.

his volume contains the proceedings of the AMS Special Session Operator Algebras and Their Applications: A Tribute to Richard V. Kadison, held from January 10–11, 2015, in San Antonio, Texas. Richard V. Kadison has been a towering figure in the study of operator algebras for more than 65 years. His research and leadership in the field have been fundamental in the development of the subject, and his influence continues to be felt though his work and the work of his many students, collaborators, and mentees. Among the topics addressed in this volume are the Kadison-Kaplanksy conjecture, classification of C∗-algebras, connections between operator spaces and parabolic induction, spectral flow, C∗-algebra actions, von Neumann algebras, and applications to mathematical physics.

This volume includes both survey and research articles on major advances and future developments in geometry and topology. Papers include those presented as part of the 5th Aarhus Conference - a meeting of international participants held in connection with ICM Berlin in 1998 - and related papers on the subject. This collection of papers is aptly published in the Contemporary Mathematics series, as the works represent the state of research and address areas of future development in the area of manifold theory and geometry. The survey articles in particular would serve well as supplemental resources in related graduate courses.

The Handbook of Homotopy Theory provides a panoramic view of an active area in mathematics that is currently seeing dramatic solutions to long-standing open problems, and is proving itself of increasing importance across many other mathematical disciplines. The origins of the subject date back to work of Henri Poincaré and Heinz Hopf in the early 20th century, but it has seen enormous progress in the 21st century. A highlight of this volume is an introduction to and diverse applications of the newly established foundational theory of ¥ -categories. The coverage is vast, ranging from axiomatic to applied, from foundational to computational, and includes surveys of applications both geometric and algebraic. The contributors are among the most active and creative researchers in the field. The 22 chapters by 31 contributors are designed to address novices, as well as established mathematicians, interested in learning the state of the art in this field, whose methods are of increasing importance in many other areas.