This is the second volume of the procedings of the second European Congress of Mathematics. Volume I presents the speeches delivered at the Congress, the list of lectures, and short summaries of the achievements of the prize winners. Together with volume II it contains a collection of contributions by the invited lecturers. Finally, volume II also presents reports on some of the Round Table discussions. This two-volume set thus gives an overview of the state of the art in many fields of mathematics and is therefore of interest to every professional mathematician. Contributors: Vol. I: N. Alon, L. Ambrosio, K. Astala, R. Benedetti, Ch. Bessenrodt, F. Bethuel, P. Bjørstad, E. Bolthausen, J. Bricmont, A. Kupiainen, D. Burago, L. Caporaso, U. Dierkes, I. Dynnikov, L.H. Eliasson, W.T. Gowers, H. Hedenmalm, A. Huber, J. Kaczorowski, J. Kollár, D.O. Kramkov, A.N. Shiryaev, C. Lescop, R. März. Vol. II: J. Matousek, D. McDuff, A.S. Merkurjev, V. Milman, St. Müller, T. Nowicki, E. Olivieri, E. Scoppola, V.P. Platonov, J. Pöschel, L. Polterovich , L. Pyber, N. Simányi, J.P. Solovej, A. Stipsicz, G. Tardos, J.-P. Tignol, A.P. Veselov, E. Zuazua.

In July 1996, a conference was organized by the editors of this volume at the Mathematische Forschungsinstitut Oberwolfach to honour Egbert Brieskorn on the occasion of his 60th birthday. Most of the mathematicians invited to the conference have been influenced in one way or another by Brieskorn's work in singularity theory. It was the first time that so many people from the Russian school could be present at a conference in singularity theory outside Russia. This volume contains papers on singularity theory and its applications, written by participants of the conference. In many cases, they are extended versions of the talks presented there. The diversity of subjects of the contributions reflects singularity theory's relevance to topology, analysis and geometry, combining ideas and techniques from all of these fields, as well as demonstrating the breadth of Brieskorn's own interests. This volume contains papers on singularity theory and its applications, written by participants of the conference. In many cases, they are extended versions of the talks presented there. The diversity of subjects of the contributions reflects singularity theory's relevance to topology, analysis and geometry, combining ideas and techniques from all of these fields, as well as demonstrates the breadth of Brieskorn's own interests.

Interest in commutative algebra has surged over the past decades. In order to survey and highlight recent developments in this rapidly expanding field, the Centre de Recerca Matematica in Bellaterra organized a ten-days Summer School on Commutative Algebra in 1996. Lectures were presented by six high-level specialists, L. Avramov (Purdue), M.K. Green (UCLA), C. Huneke (Purdue), P. Schenzel (Halle), G. Valla (Genova) and W.V. Vasconcelos (Rutgers), providing a fresh and extensive account of the results, techniques and problems of some of the most active areas of research. The present volume is a synthesis of the lectures given by these authors. Research workers as well as graduate students in commutative algebra and nearby areas will find a useful overview of the field and recent developments in it. Reviews "All six articles are at a very high level; they provide a thorough survey of results and methods in their subject areas, illustrated with algebraic or geometric examples." - Acta Scientiarum Mathematicarum Avramov lecture: "... it contains all the major results [on infinite free resolutions], it explains carefully all the different techniques that apply, it provides complete proofs (...). This will be extremely helpful for the novice as well as the experienced." - Mathematical reviews Huneke lecture: "The topic is tight closure, a theory developed by M. Hochster and the author which has in a short time proved to be a useful and powerful tool. (...) The paper is extremely well organized, written, and motivated." - Zentralblatt MATH Schenzel lecture: "... this paper is an excellent introduction to applications of local cohomology." - Zentralblatt MATH Valla lecture: "... since he is an acknowledged expert on Hilbert functions and since his interest has been so broad, he has done a superb job in giving the readers a lively picture of the theory." - Mathematical reviews Vasconcelos lecture: "This is a very useful survey on invariants of modules over noetherian rings, relations between them, and how to compute them." - Zentralblatt MATH

This is the first volume of the proceedings of the third European Congress of Mathematics. Volume I presents the speeches delivered at the Congress, the list of lectures, and short summaries of the achievements of the prize winners as well as papers by plenary and parallel speakers. The second volume collects articles by prize winners and speakers of the mini-symposia. This two-volume set thus gives an overview of the state of the art in many fields of mathematics and is therefore of interest to every professional mathematician. Contributors: R. Ahlswede, V. Bach, V. Baladi, J. Bruna, N. Burq, X. Cabré, P.J. Cameron, Z. Chatzidakis, C. Ciliberto, G. Dal Maso, J. Denef, R. Dijkgraaf, B. Fantechi, H. Föllmer, A.B. Goncharov, A. Grigor'yan, M. Harris, R. Iturriaga, K. Johansson, K. Khanin, P. Koskela, H.W. Lenstra, Jr., F. Loeser, Y.I. Manin, N.S. Manton, Y. Meyer, I. Moerdijk, E.M. Opdam, T. Peternell, B.M.A.G. Piette, A. Reznikov, H. Schlichtkrull, B. Schmidt, K. Schmidt, C. Simó, B. Tóth, E. van den Ban, M.-F. Vignéras, O. Viro.

Central to this collection of papers are new developments in the general theory of localization of spaces. This field has undergone tremendous change of late and is yielding new insight into the mysteries of classical homotopy theory. The present volume comprises the refereed articles submitted at the Conference on Algebraic Topology held in Sant Feliu de Guíxols, Spain, in June 1994. Several comprehensive articles on general localization clarify the basic tools and give a report on the state of the art in the subject matter. The text is therefore accessible not only to the professional mathematician but also to the advanced student.

Sub-Riemannian geometry (also known as Carnot geometry in France, and non-holonomic Riemannian geometry in Russia) has been a full research domain for fifteen years, with motivations and ramifications in several parts of pure and applied mathematics, namely: control theory classical mechanics Riemannian geometry (of which sub-Riemannian geometry constitutes a natural generalization, and where sub-Riemannian metrics may appear as limit cases) diffusion on manifolds analysis of hypoelliptic operators Cauchy-Riemann (or CR) geometry. Although links between these domains had been foreseen by many authors in the past, it is only in recent years that sub- Riemannian geometry has been recognized as a possible common framework for all these topics. This book provides an introduction to sub-Riemannian geometry and presents the state of the art and open problems in the field. It consists of five coherent and original articles by the leading specialists: Andr Bellache: The tangent space in sub-Riemannian geometry Mikhael Gromov: Carnot-Carathodory spaces seen from within Richard Montgomery: Survey of singular geodesics Hctor J. Sussmann: A cornucopia of four-dimensional abnormal sub-Riemannian minimizers Jean-Michel Coron: Stabilization of controllable systems.