Lars Ahlfors's Lectures on Quasiconformal Mappings, based on a course he gave at Harvard University in the spring term of 1964, was first published in 1966 and was soon recognized as the classic it was shortly destined to become. These lectures develop the theory of quasiconformal mappings from scratch, give a self-contained treatment of the Beltrami equation, and cover the basic properties of Teichmuller spaces, including the Bers embedding and the Teichmuller curve. It is remarkable how Ahlfors goes straight to the heart of the matter, presenting major results with a minimum set of prerequisites. Many graduate students and other mathematicians have learned the foundations of the theories of quasiconformal mappings and Teichmuller spaces from these lecture notes. This edition includes three new chapters. The first, written by Earle and Kra, describes further developments in the theory of Teichmuller spaces and provides many references to the vast literature on Teichmuller spaces and quasiconformal mappings. The second, by Shishikura, describes how quasiconformal mappings have revitalized the subject of complex dynamics. The third, by Hubbard, illustrates the role of these mappings in Thurston's theory of hyperbolic structures on 3-manifolds. Together, these three new chapters exhibit the continuing vitality and importance of the theory of quasiconformal mappings.

In honor of Frederick W. Gehring on the occasion of his 70th birthday, an international conference on ""Quasiconformal mappings and analysis"" was held in Ann Arbor in August 1995. The 9 main speakers of the conference (Astala, Earle, Jones, Kra, Lehto, Martin, Pommerenke, Sullivan, and Vaisala) provide broad expository articles on various aspects of quasiconformal mappings and their relations to other areas of analysis. 12 other distinguished mathematicians contribute articles to this volume.

This book offers a modern, up-to-date introduction to quasiconformal mappings from an explicitly geometric perspective, emphasizing both the extensive developments in mapping theory during the past few decades and the remarkable applications of geometric function theory to other fields, including dynamical systems, Kleinian groups, geometric topology, differential geometry, and geometric group theory. It is a careful and detailed introduction to the higher-dimensional theory of quasiconformal mappings from the geometric viewpoint, based primarily on the technique of the conformal modulus of a curve family. Notably, the final chapter describes the application of quasiconformal mapping theory to Mostow's celebrated rigidity theorem in its original context with all the necessary background. This book will be suitable as a textbook for graduate students and researchers interested in beginning to work on mapping theory problems or learning the basics of the geometric approach to quasiconformal mappings. Only a basic background in multidimensional real analysis is assumed.