The significantly expanded second edition of this book combines a fascinating account of the life and work of Bernhard Riemann with a lucid discussion of current interaction between topology and physics. The author, a distinguished mathematical physicist, takes into account his own research at the Riemann archives of Göttingen University and developments over the last decade that connect Riemann with numerous significant ideas and methods reflected throughout contemporary mathematics and physics. Special attention is paid in part one to results on the Riemann–Hilbert problem and, in part two, to discoveries in field theory and condensed matter.

The significantly expanded second edition of this book combines a fascinating account of the life and work of Bernhard Riemann with a lucid discussion of current interaction between topology and physics. The author, a distinguished mathematical physicist, takes into account his own research at the Riemann archives of Göttingen University and developments over the last decade that connect Riemann with numerous significant ideas and methods reflected throughout contemporary mathematics and physics. Special attention is paid in part one to results on the Riemann–Hilbert problem and, in part two, to discoveries in field theory and condensed matter.

Soviet citizens can buy Monastyrsky's biography of Riemann for eleven kopeks. This translated edition will cost considerably more, but it is still good value for the money. And we get Monastyrsky's monograph on topological methods in the bargain. It was a good idea of Birkhiiuser Boston to publish the two translations in one volume. The economics of publishing in a capitalist country make it impossible for us to produce the small cheap paperback booklets, low in quality of paper and high in quality of scholarship, at which the Soviet publishing industry excels. Monastyrsky's two booklets are out standing examples of the genre. By putting them together, Birkhiiuser has enabled them to fit into the Western book-marketing system. The two booklets were written separately and each is complete in itself, but they complement each other beautifully. The Riemann biography is short and terse, like Riemann's own writings. It describes in few words and fewer equations the revolutionary ideas which Riemann brought into mathematics and physics a hundred and twenty years ago. The topological methods booklet describes how some of these same ideas, after lying dormant for a century, found new and fruitful applications in the physics of our own time.

This book explores the work of Bernhard Riemann and its impact on mathematics, philosophy and physics. It features contributions from a range of fields, historical expositions, and selected research articles that were motivated by Riemann’s ideas and demonstrate their timelessness. The editors are convinced of the tremendous value of going into Riemann’s work in depth, investigating his original ideas, integrating them into a broader perspective, and establishing ties with modern science and philosophy. Accordingly, the contributors to this volume are mathematicians, physicists, philosophers and historians of science. The book offers a unique resource for students and researchers in the fields of mathematics, physics and philosophy, historians of science, and more generally to a wide range of readers interested in the history of ideas.

This text focuses on developing an intimate acquaintance with the geometric meaning of curvature and thereby introduces and demonstrates all the main technical tools needed for a more advanced course on Riemannian manifolds. It covers proving the four most fundamental theorems relating curvature and topology: the Gauss-Bonnet Theorem, the Cartan-Hadamard Theorem, Bonnet’s Theorem, and a special case of the Cartan-Ambrose-Hicks Theorem.

'The book is an engaging and influential collection of significant contributions from an assembly of world expert leaders and pioneers from different fields, working at the interface between topology and physics or applications of topology to physical systems … The book explores many interesting and novel topics that lie at the intersection between gravity, quantum fields, condensed matter, physical cosmology and topology … A rich, well-organized, and comprehensive overview of remarkable and insightful connections between physics and topology is here made available to the physics reader.'Contemporary PhysicsSince its birth in Poincaré's seminal 1894 'Analysis Situs', topology has become a cornerstone of mathematics. As with all beautiful mathematical concepts, topology inevitably — resonating with that Wignerian principle of the effectiveness of mathematics in the natural sciences — finds its prominent role in physics. From Chern-Simons theory to topological quantum field theory, from knot invariants to Calabi-Yau compactification in string theory, from spacetime topology in cosmology to the recent Nobel Prize winning work on topological insulators, the interactions between topology and physics have been a triumph over the past few decades.In this eponymous volume, we are honoured to have contributions from an assembly of grand masters of the field, guiding us with their world-renowned expertise on the subject of the interplay between 'Topology' and 'Physics'. Beginning with a preface by Chen Ning Yang on his recollections of the early days, we proceed to a novel view of nuclei from the perspective of complex geometry by Sir Michael Atiyah and Nick Manton, followed by an entrée toward recent developments in two-dimensional gravity and intersection theory on the moduli space of Riemann surfaces by Robbert Dijkgraaf and Edward Witten; a study of Majorana fermions and relations to the Braid group by Louis H Kauffman; a pioneering investigation on arithmetic gauge theory by Minhyong Kim; an anecdote-enriched review of singularity theorems in black-hole physics by Sir Roger Penrose; an adventure beyond anyons by Zhenghan Wang; an aperçu on topological insulators from first-principle calculations by Haijun Zhang and Shou-Cheng Zhang; finishing with synopsis on quantum information theory as one of the four revolutions in physics and the second quantum revolution by Xiao-Gang Wen. We hope that this book will serve to inspire the research community.

An authoritative but accessible text on one dimensional complex manifolds or Riemann surfaces. Dealing with the main results on Riemann surfaces from a variety of points of view; it pulls together material from global analysis, topology, and algebraic geometry, and covers the essential mathematical methods and tools.