Volume 2 of two - also available in a set of both volumes.

During the 1980s, profound connections were discovered relating modern algebraic geometry and algebraic $K$-theory to arithmetic problems. The term ``arithmetic algebraic geometry'' was coined during that period and is now used to denote an entire branch of modern number theory. These same developments in algebraic geometry and $K$-theory greatly influenced research on the arithmetic of fields in general, and the algebraic theory of quadratic forms and the theory of finite-dimensional division algebras in particular. This book contains papers presented at an AMS Summer Research Institute held in July 1992 at the University of California, Santa Barbara. The purpose of the conference was to provide a broad overview of the tools from algebraic geometry and $K$-theory that have proved to be the most powerful in solving problems in the theory of quadratic forms and division algebras. In addition, the conference provided a venue for exposition of recent research. A substantial portion of the lectures of the major conference speakers--Colliot-Thelene, Merkurjev, Raskind, Saltman, Suslin, Swan--are reproduced in the expository articles in this book.

A NATO Advanced Study Institute entitled "Algebraic K-theory: Connections with Geometry and Topology" was held at the Chateau Lake Louise, Lake Louise, Alberta, Canada from December 7 to December 11 of 1987. This meeting was jointly supported by NATO and the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada, and was sponsored in part by the Canadian Mathematical Society. This book is the volume of proceedings for that meeting. Algebraic K-theory is essentially the study of homotopy invariants arising from rings and their associated matrix groups. More importantly perhaps, the subject has become central to the study of the relationship between Topology, Algebraic Geometry and Number Theory. It draws on all of these fields as a subject in its own right, but it serves as well as an effective translator for the application of concepts from one field in another. The papers in this volume are representative of the current state of the subject. They are, for the most part, research papers which are primarily of interest to researchers in the field and to those aspiring to be such. There is a section on problems in this volume which should be of particular interest to students; it contains a discussion of the problems from Gersten's well-known list of 1973, as well as a short list of new problems.

An introduction to algebraic K-theory with no prerequisite beyond a first semester of algebra.