This collection is the proceedings volume for the AMS-IMS-SIAM Joint Summer Research Conference, Lusternik-Schnirelmann Category, held in 2001 at Mount Holyoke College in Massachusetts. The conference attracted an international group of 37 participants that included many leading experts. The contributions included here represent some of the field's most able practitioners. With a surge of recent activity, exciting advances have been made in this field, including the resolution of several long-standing conjectures. Lusternik-Schnirelmann category is a numerical homotopy invariant that also provides a lower bound for the number of critical points of a smooth function on a manifold. The study of this invariant, together with related notions, forms a subject lying on the boundary between homotopy theory and critical point theory. These articles cover a wide range of topics: from a focus on concrete computations and applications to more abstract extensions of the fundamental ideas. The volume includes a survey article by P. Hilton that discusses earlier results from homotopy theory that form the basis for more recent work in this area. In this volume, professional mathematicians in topology and dynamical systems as well as graduate students will catch glimpses of the most recent views of the subject.

''Lusternik-Schnirelmann category is like a Picasso painting. Looking at category from different perspectives produces completely different impressions of category's beauty and applicability.'' --from the Introduction Lusternik-Schnirelmann category is a subject with ties to both algebraic topology and dynamical systems. The authors take LS-category as the central theme, and then develop topics in topology and dynamics around it. Included are exercises and many examples. The book presents the material in a rich, expository style. The book provides a unified approach to LS-category, including foundational material on homotopy theoretic aspects, the Lusternik-Schnirelmann theorem on critical points, and more advanced topics such as Hopf invariants, the construction of functions with few critical points, connections with symplectic geometry, the complexity of algorithms, and category of $3$-manifolds. This is the first book to synthesize these topics. It takes readers from the very basics of the subject to the state of the art. Prerequisites are few: two semesters of algebraic topology and, perhaps, differential topology. It is suitable for graduate students and researchers interested

This volume contains the proceedings of the mini-workshop on Topological Complexity and Related Topics, held from February 28–March 5, 2016, at the Mathematisches Forschungsinstitut Oberwolfach. Topological complexity is a numerical homotopy invariant, defined by Farber in the early twenty-first century as part of a topological approach to the motion planning problem in robotics. It continues to be the subject of intensive research by homotopy theorists, partly due to its potential applicability, and partly due to its close relationship to more classical invariants, such as the Lusternik–Schnirelmann category and the Schwarz genus. This volume contains survey articles and original research papers on topological complexity and its many generalizations and variants, to give a snapshot of contemporary research on this exciting topic at the interface of pure mathematics and engineering.

This volume is the proceedings of the Ramanujan International Symposium on Kac-Moody Lie algebras and their applications. The symposium provided researchers in mathematics and physics with the opportunity to discuss new developments in this rapidly-growing area of research. The book contains several excellent articles with new and significant results. It is suitable for graduate students and researchers working in Kac-Moody Lie algebras, their applications, and related areas of research.

This volume contains the proceedings of the Workshop on Homotopy Theory of Function Spaces and Related Topics, which was held at the Mathematisches Forschungsinstitut Oberwolfach, in Germany, from April 5-11, 2009. This volume contains fourteen original research articles covering a broad range of topics that include: localization and rational homotopy theory, evaluation subgroups, free loop spaces, Whitehead products, spaces of algebraic maps, gauge groups, loop groups, operads, and string topology. In addition to reporting on various topics in the area, this volume is supposed to facilitate the exchange of ideas within Homotopy Theory of Function Spaces, and promote cross-fertilization between Homotopy Theory of Function Spaces and other areas. With these latter aims in mind, this volume includes a survey article which, with its extensive bibliography, should help bring researchers and graduate students up to speed on activity in this field as well as a problems list, which is an expanded and edited version of problems discussed in sessions held at the conference. The problems list is intended to suggest directions for future work.

This volume offers the proceedings from the workshop held at the University of Milan (Italy) on groups of homotopy self-equivalences and related topics. The book comprises the articles relating current research on the group of homotopy self-equivalences, homotopy of function spaces, rational homotopy theory, classification of homotopy types, and equivariant homotopy theory. Mathematicians from many areas of the globe attended the workshops to discuss their research and to share ideas. Included are two specially-written articles, by J.W. Rutter, reviewing the work done in the area of homotopy self-equivalences since 1988. Included also is a bibliography of some 122 articles published since 1988 and a list of problems. This book is suitable for both advanced graduate students and researchers.

Farber examines the geometrical, topological, and dynamical properties of closed one-forms, highlighting the relations between their global and local features. He describes the Novikov numbers and inequalities, the universal complex and its construction, Bott-type inequalities and those with Von Neumann Betti numbers, equivariant theory, the exactness of Novikov inequalities, the Morse theory of harmonic forms, and Lusternick-Schnirelman theory. Annotation : 2004 Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com).