This volume contains articles written by the invited speakers and workshop participants from the conference on "Crystallographic Groups and Their Generalizations", held at Katholieke Universiteit Leuven, Kortrijk (Belgium). Presented are recent developments and open problems. Topics include the theory of affine structures and polynomial structures, affine Schottky groups and crooked tilings, theory and problems on the geometry of finitely generated solvable groups, flat Lorentz 3-manifolds and Fuchsian groups, filiform Lie algebras, hyperbolic automorphisms and Anosov diffeomorphisms on infra-nilmanifolds, localization theory of virtually nilpotent groups and aspherical spaces, projective varieties, and results on affine appartment systems. Participants delivered high-level research mathematics and a discussion was held forum for new researchers. The survey results and original papers contained in this volume offer a comprehensive view of current developments in the field.

Mathematics has been behind many of humanity's most significant advances in fields as varied as genome sequencing, medical science, space exploration, and computer technology. But those breakthroughs were yesterday. Where will mathematicians lead us tomorrow and can we help to shape that destiny? This book assembles carefully selected articles highlighting and explaining cutting-edge research and scholarship in mathematics.

Motivated by some notorious open problems, such as the Jacobian conjecture and the tame generators problem, the subject of polynomial automorphisms has become a rapidly growing field of interest. This book, the first in the field, collects many of the results scattered throughout the literature. It introduces the reader to a fascinating subject and brings him to the forefront of research in this area. Some of the topics treated are invertibility criteria, face polynomials, the tame generators problem, the cancellation problem, exotic spaces, DNA for polynomial automorphisms, the Abhyankar-Moh theorem, stabilization methods, dynamical systems, the Markus-Yamabe conjecture, group actions, Hilbert's 14th problem, various linearization problems and the Jacobian conjecture. The work is essentially self-contained and aimed at the level of beginning graduate students. Exercises are included at the end of each section. At the end of the book there are appendices to cover used material from algebra, algebraic geometry, D-modules and Gröbner basis theory. A long list of ''strong'' examples and an extensive bibliography conclude the book.

The book is a bilingual (French and English) edition of the mathematical correspondence between A. Grothendieck and J-P. Serre. The original French text of 84 letters is supplemented here by the English translation, with French text printed on the left-hand pages and the corresponding English text printed on the right-hand pages. The book also includes several facsimiles of original letters. The letters presented in the book were mainly written between 1955 and 1965. During this period, algebraic geometry went through a remarkable transformation, and Grothendieck and Serre were among central figures in this process. The reader can follow the creation of some of the most important notions of modern mathematics, like sheaf cohomology, schemes, Riemann-Roch type theorems, algebraic fundamental group, motives. The letters also reflect the mathematical and political atmosphere of this period (Bourbaki, Paris, Harvard, Princeton, war in Algeria, etc.). Also included are a few letters written between 1984 and 1987. The letters are supplemented by J-P. Serre's notes, which give explanations, corrections, and references further results. The book should be useful to specialists in algebraic geometry, in history of mathematics, and to all mathematicians who want to understand how great mathematics is created.

On the sixtieth birthday of Andre Lichnerowicz a number of his friends, students, and coworkers decided to celebrate this event by preparing a jubilee volume of contributed articles in the two main fields of research marked by Lichnerowicz's work: differential geometry and mathematical physics. It was impossible to reflect in a single book the great variety of subjects tackled by Lichnerowicz. We hope that this book reflects some of the present trends of fields in which he worked, and some of the subjects to which he contributed in his long - and not yet finished - career. This career was very much marked by the influence of his masters, Elie Cartan who introduced him to research in mathematics, mainly in geometry and its relations with mathematical physics, and Georges Darmois who developed his interest in mechanics and physics, especially the theory of relativity and electromagnetism. This combination, and his personal talent, made him a natural scientific heir and continuator of the French mathematical physics school in the tradition of Henri Poincare. Some of his works would even be best qualified by a new field name, that of physical mathematics: branches of pure mathematics entirely motivated by physics.