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 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.

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.

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