Contributes to the theory of Borel equivalence relations, considered up to Borel reducibility, and measures preserving group actions considered up to orbit equivalence. This title catalogs the actions of products of the free group and obtains additional rigidity theorems and relative ergodicity results in this context.

The study of group actions is more than a hundred years old but remains to this day a vibrant and widely studied topic in a variety of mathematic fields. A central development in the last fifty years is the phenomenon of rigidity, whereby one can classify actions of certain groups, such as lattices in semi-simple Lie groups. This provides a way to classify all possible symmetries of important spaces and all spaces admitting given symmetries. Paradigmatic results can be found in the seminal work of George Mostow, Gergory Margulis, and Robert J. Zimmer, among others. The papers in Geometry, Rigidity, and Group Actions explore the role of group actions and rigidity in several areas of mathematics, including ergodic theory, dynamics, geometry, topology, and the algebraic properties of representation varieties. In some cases, the dynamics of the possible group actions are the principal focus of inquiry. In other cases, the dynamics of group actions are a tool for proving theorems about algebra, geometry, or topology. This volume contains surveys of some of the main directions in the field, as well as research articles on topics of current interest.

Numbers imitate space, which is of such a di?erent nature —Blaise Pascal It is fair to date the study of the foundation of mathematics back to the ancient Greeks. The urge to understand and systematize the mathematics of the time led Euclid to postulate axioms in an early attempt to put geometry on a ?rm footing. With roots in the Elements, the distinctive methodology of mathematics has become proof. Inevitably two questions arise: What are proofs? and What assumptions are proofs based on? The ?rst question, traditionally an internal question of the ?eld of logic, was also wrestled with in antiquity. Aristotle gave his famous syllogistic s- tems, and the Stoics had a nascent propositional logic. This study continued with ?ts and starts, through Boethius, the Arabs and the medieval logicians in Paris and London. The early germs of logic emerged in the context of philosophy and theology. The development of analytic geometry, as exempli?ed by Descartes, ill- tratedoneofthedi?cultiesinherentinfoundingmathematics. Itisclassically phrased as the question ofhow one reconciles the arithmetic with the geom- ric. Arenumbers onetypeofthingand geometricobjectsanother? Whatare the relationships between these two types of objects? How can they interact? Discovery of new types of mathematical objects, such as imaginary numbers and, much later, formal objects such as free groups and formal power series make the problem of ?nding a common playing ?eld for all of mathematics importunate. Several pressures made foundational issues urgent in the 19th century.

A study of ergodic, measure preserving actions of countable discrete groups on standard probability spaces. It explores a direction that emphasizes a global point of view, concentrating on the structure of the space of measure preserving actions of a given group and its associated cocycle spaces.

ICM 2010 proceedings comprises a four-volume set containing articles based on plenary lectures and invited section lectures, the Abel and Noether lectures, as well as contributions based on lectures delivered by the recipients of the Fields Medal, the Nevanlinna, and Chern Prizes. The first volume will also contain the speeches at the opening and closing ceremonies and other highlights of the Congress.

Presents Results from a Very Active Area of ResearchExploring an active area of mathematics that studies the complexity of equivalence relations and classification problems, Invariant Descriptive Set Theory presents an introduction to the basic concepts, methods, and results of this theory. It brings together techniques from various areas of mathem

The European Congress of Mathematics, held every four years, has established itself as a major international mathematical event. Following those in Paris, 1992, Budapest, 1996, and Barcelona, 2000, the Fourth European Congress of Mathematics took place in Stockholm, Sweden, June 27 to July 2, 2004, with 913 participants from 65 countries. Apart from seven plenary and thirty three invited lectures, there were six Science Lectures covering the most relevant aspects of mathematics in science and technology. Moreover, twelve projects of the EU Research Training Networks in Mathematics and Information Sciences, as well as Programmes from the European Science Foundation in Physical and Engineering Sciences, were presented. Ten EMS Prizes were awarded to young European mathematicians who have made a particular contribution to the progress of mathematics. Five of the prizewinners were independently chosen by the 4ECM Scientific Committee as plenary or invited speakers. The other five prizewinners gave their lectures in parallel sessions. Most of these contributions are now collected in this volume, providing a permanent record of so much that is best in mathematics today.

The author obtains some classification result for the mapping class groups of compact orientable surfaces in terms of measure equivalence. In particular, the mapping class groups of different closed surfaces cannot be measure equivalent. Moreover, the author gives various examples of discrete groups which are not measure equivalent to the mapping class groups. In the course of the proof, the author investigates amenability in a measurable sense for the actions of the mapping class group on the boundary at infinity of the curve complex and on the Thurston boundary and, using this investigation, proves that the mapping class group of a compact orientable surface is exact.

Let $G$ be a compact, simply connected, simple Lie group. By applying the notion of a twisted tensor product in the senses of Brown as well as of Hess, we construct an economical injective resolution to compute, as an algebra, the cotorsion product which is the $E_2$-term of the cobar type Eilenberg-Moore spectral sequence converging to the cohomology of classifying space of the loop group $LG$. As an application, the cohomology $H^*(BLSpin(10); \mathbb{Z}/2)$ is explicitly determined as an $H^*(BSpin(10); \mathbb{Z}/2)$-module by using effectively the cobar type spectral sequence and the Hochschild spectral sequence, and further, by analyzing the TV-model for $BSpin(10)$.