This volume presents papers dedicated to Professor Shoshichi Kobayashi, commemorating the occasion of his sixtieth birthday on January 4, 1992.The principal theme of this volume is “Geometry and Analysis on Complex Manifolds”. It emphasizes the wide mathematical influence that Professor Kobayashi has on areas ranging from differential geometry to complex analysis and algebraic geometry. It covers various materials including holomorphic vector bundles on complex manifolds, Kähler metrics and Einstein-Hermitian metrics, geometric function theory in several complex variables, and symplectic or non-Kähler geometry on complex manifolds. These are areas in which Professor Kobayashi has made strong impact and is continuing to make many deep invaluable contributions.

This volume presents papers dedicated to Professor Shoshichi Kobayashi, commemorating the occasion of his sixtieth birthday on January 4, 1992.The principal theme of this volume is “Geometry and Analysis on Complex Manifolds”. It emphasizes the wide mathematical influence that Professor Kobayashi has on areas ranging from differential geometry to complex analysis and algebraic geometry. It covers various materials including holomorphic vector bundles on complex manifolds, Kähler metrics and Einstein–Hermitian metrics, geometric function theory in several complex variables, and symplectic or non-Kähler geometry on complex manifolds. These are areas in which Professor Kobayashi has made strong impact and is continuing to make many deep invaluable contributions.

This volume is dedicated to the memory of Shoshichi Kobayashi, and gathers contributions from distinguished researchers working on topics close to his research areas. The book is organized into three parts, with the first part presenting an overview of Professor Shoshichi Kobayashi’s career. This is followed by two expository course lectures (the second part) on recent topics in extremal Kähler metrics and value distribution theory, which will be helpful for graduate students in mathematics interested in new topics in complex geometry and complex analysis. Lastly, the third part of the volume collects authoritative research papers on differential geometry and complex analysis. Professor Shoshichi Kobayashi was a recognized international leader in the areas of differential and complex geometry. He contributed crucial ideas that are still considered fundamental in these fields. The book will be of interest to researchers in the fields of differential geometry, complex geometry, and several complex variables geometry, as well as to graduate students in mathematics.

The KSCV Symposium, the Korean Conference on Several Complex Variables, started in 1997 in an effort to promote the study of complex analysis and geometry. Since then, the conference met semi-regularly for about 10 years and then settled on being held biannually. The sixth and tenth conferences were held in 2002 and 2014 as satellite conferences to the Beijing International Congress of Mathematicians (ICM) and the Seoul ICM, respectively. The purpose of the KSCV Symposium is to organize the research talks of many leading scholars in the world, to provide an opportunity for communication, and to promote new researchers in this field.

This proceedings is a collection of articles in several complex variables with emphasis on geometric methods and results, which includes several survey papers reviewing the development of the topics in these decades. Through this volume one can see an active field providing insight into other fields like algebraic geometry, dynamical systems and partial differential equations.

This meeting has been motivated by two events: the 85th birthday of Pierre Lelong, and the end of the third year of the European network "Complex analysis and analytic geometry" from the programme Human Capital and Mobility. For the first event, Mathematicians from Poland, Sweden, United States and France, whose work is particularly related to the one ofP. Lelong have accepted to participate; for the second, the different teams of the Network sent lecturers to report on their most recent works. These teams are from Grenoble, Wuppertal, Berlin, Pisa and Paris VI; in fact, most of their results are also related to Lelong's work and, a posteriori, it is difficult to decide whether a talk is motivated by the first or by the second event. We chose only plenary lectures, usually of one hour, except a small number, given by young mathematicians, which have been shorter. A two hours problem session has been organized. The Proceedings gather papers which are exact texts of the talks, or are closely related to them. The members from the Network and five other lecturers sent us papers; the other lecturers published the content of their talks in mathematical Journals. All the presented texts have been submitted to referees independent of the organizing committee; the texts of the problems have been approved by their authors.

This book contains recent and exciting developments on the structure of moduli spaces, with an emphasis on the algebraic structures that underlie this structure. Topics covered include Hilbert schemes of points, moduli of instantons, coherent sheaves and their derived categories, moduli of flat connections, Hodge structures, and the topology of affine varieties. Two beautiful series of lectures are a particularly fine feature of the book. One is an introductory series by Manfred Lehn on the topology and geometry of Hilbert schemes of points on surfaces, and the other, by Hiraku Nakajima and Kota Yoshioka, explains their recent work on the moduli space of instantons over ${\mathbb R 4$. The material is suitable for graduate students and researchers interested in moduli spaces in algebraic geometry, topology, and mathematical physics.