Riemannian Topology and Structures on Manifolds results from a similarly entitled conference held on the occasion of Charles P. Boyer’s 65th birthday. The various contributions to this volume discuss recent advances in the areas of positive sectional curvature, Kähler and Sasakian geometry, and their interrelation to mathematical physics, especially M and superstring theory. Focusing on these fundamental ideas, this collection presents review articles, original results, and open problems of interest.

This book offers an extensive modern treatment of Sasakian geometry, which is of importance in many different fields in geometry and physics.

This second edition, divided into fourteen chapters, presents a comprehensive treatment of contact and symplectic manifolds from the Riemannian point of view. The monograph examines the basic ideas in detail and provides many illustrative examples for the reader. Riemannian Geometry of Contact and Symplectic Manifolds, Second Edition provides new material in most chapters, but a particular emphasis remains on contact manifolds. Researchers, mathematicians, and graduate students in contact and symplectic manifold theory and in Riemannian geometry will benefit from this work. A basic course in Riemannian geometry is a prerequisite.

The purpose of this handbook is to give an overview of some recent developments in differential geometry related to supersymmetric field theories. The main themes covered are: Special geometry and supersymmetry Generalized geometry Geometries with torsion Para-geometries Holonomy theory Symmetric spaces and spaces of constant curvature Conformal geometry Wave equations on Lorentzian manifolds D-branes and K-theory The intended audience consists of advanced students and researchers working in differential geometry, string theory, and related areas. The emphasis is on geometrical structures occurring on target spaces of supersymmetric field theories. Some of these structures can be fully described in the classical framework of pseudo-Riemannian geometry. Others lead to new concepts relating various fields of research, such as special Kahler geometry or generalized geometry.

This monograph introduces readers to locally conformally Kähler (LCK) geometry and provides an extensive overview of the most current results. A rapidly developing area in complex geometry dealing with non-Kähler manifolds, LCK geometry has strong links to many other areas of mathematics, including algebraic geometry, topology, and complex analysis. The authors emphasize these connections to create a unified and rigorous treatment of the subject suitable for both students and researchers. Part I builds the necessary foundations for those approaching LCK geometry for the first time with full, mostly self-contained proofs and also covers material often omitted from textbooks, such as contact and Sasakian geometry, orbifolds, Ehresmann connections, and foliation theory. More advanced topics are then treated in Part II, including non-Kähler elliptic surfaces, cohomology of holomorphic vector bundles on Hopf manifolds, Kuranishi and Teichmüller spaces for LCK manifolds with potential, and harmonic forms on Sasakian and Vaisman manifolds. Each chapter in Parts I and II begins with motivation and historic context for the topics explored and includes numerous exercises for further exploration of important topics. Part III surveys the current research on LCK geometry, describing advances on topics such as automorphism groups on LCK manifolds, twisted Hamiltonian actions and LCK reduction, Einstein-Weyl manifolds and the Futaki invariant, and LCK geometry on nilmanifolds and on solvmanifolds. New proofs of many results are given using the methods developed earlier in the text. The text then concludes with a chapter that gathers over 100 open problems, with context and remarks provided where possible, to inspire future research. .

Special geometries as well as the relation between curvature and topology have always been of interest to differential geometers. More recently, these topics have turned out to be of use in physical problems related to string theory as well. This volume provides a unique and thorough survey on the latest developments on Riemannian geometry, special geometrical structures on manifolds, and their interactions with other fields such as mathematical physics, complex analysis, andalgebraic geometry. This volume presents ten papers written by participants of the ``Short Program on Riemannian Geometry,'' a workshop held at the CRM in Montreal in 2004. It will be a valuable reference for graduate students and research mathematicians alike. Information for our distributors: Titles inthis series are copublished with the Centre de Recherches Mathematiques.

Since its discovery in 1997 by Maldacena, AdS/CFT correspondence has become one of the prime subjects of interest in string theory, as well as one of the main meeting points between theoretical physics and mathematics. On the physical side, it provides a duality between a theory of quantum gravity and a field theory. The mathematical counterpart is the relation between Einstein metrics and their conformal boundaries. The correspondence has been intensively studied, and a lot of progress emerged from the confrontation of viewpoints between mathematics and physics. Written by leading experts and directed at research mathematicians and theoretical physicists as well as graduate students, this volume gives an overview of this important area both in theoretical physics and in mathematics. It contains survey articles giving a broad overview of the subject and of the main questions, as well as more specialized articles providing new insight both on the Riemannian side and on the Lorentzian side of the theory.