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

Symmetry has a strong impact on the number and shape of solutions to variational problems. This has been observed, for instance, in the search for periodic solutions of Hamiltonian systems or of the nonlinear wave equation; when one is interested in elliptic equations on symmetric domains or in the corresponding semiflows; and when one is looking for "special" solutions of these problems. This book is concerned with Lusternik-Schnirelmann theory and Morse-Conley theory for group invariant functionals. These topological methods are developed in detail with new calculations of the equivariant Lusternik-Schnirelmann category and versions of the Borsuk-Ulam theorem for very general classes of symmetry groups. The Morse-Conley theory is applied to bifurcation problems, in particular to the bifurcation of steady states and hetero-clinic orbits of O(3)-symmetric flows; and to the existence of periodic solutions nearequilibria of symmetric Hamiltonian systems. Some familiarity with the usualminimax theory and basic algebraic topology is assumed.

This book contains a collection of articles summarizing the state of knowledge in a large portion of modern homotopy theory. A call for articles was made on the occasion of an emphasis semester organized by the Centre de Recerca Matemtica in Bellaterra (Barcelona) in 1998. The main topics treated in the book include abstract features of stable and unstable homotopy, homotopical localizations, p-compact groups, H-spaces, classifying spaces for proper actions, cohomology of discrete groups, K-theory and other generalized cohomology theories, configuration spaces, and Lusternik-Schnirelmann category. The book is addressed to all mathematicians interested in homotopy theory and in geometric aspects of group theory. New research directions in topology are highlighted. Moreover, this informative and educational book serves as a welcome reference for many new results and recent methods.

This is a long awaited book on rational homotopy theory which contains all the main theorems with complete proofs, and more elementary proofs for many results that were proved ten or fifteen years ago. The authors added a frist section on classical algebraic topology to make the book accessible to students with only little background in algebraic topology.

The aim of this international conference the third of its type was to survey recent developments in Geometric Topology and Shape Theory with an emphasis on their interaction. The volume contains original research papers and carefully selected survey of currently active areas. The main topics and themes represented by the papers of this volume include decomposition theory, cell-like mappings and CE-equivalent compacta, covering dimension versus cohomological dimension, ANR's and LCn-compacta, homology manifolds, embeddings of continua into manifolds, complement theorems in shape theory, approximate fibrations and shape fibrations, fibered shape, exact homologies and strong shape theory.

This work presents invited contributions from the second "International Conference on Mathematics and Statistics" jointly organized by the AUS (American University of Sharjah) and the AMS (American Mathematical Society). Addressing several research fields across the mathematical sciences, all of the papers were prepared by faculty members at universities in the Gulf region or prominent international researchers. The current volume is the first of its kind in the UAE and is intended to set new standards of excellence for collaboration and scholarship in the region.