Low-dimensional topology has long been a fertile area for the interaction of many different disciplines of mathematics, including differential geometry, hyperbolic geometry, combinatorics, representation theory, global analysis, classical mechanics, and theoretical physics. The Park City Mathematics Institute summer school in 2006 explored in depth the most exciting recent aspects of this interaction, aimed at a broad audience of both graduate students and researchers. The present volume is based on lectures presented at the summer school on low-dimensional topology. These notes give fresh, concise, and high-level introductions to these developments, often with new arguments not found elsewhere. The volume will be of use both to graduate students seeking to enter the field of low-dimensional topology and to senior researchers wishing to keep up with current developments. The volume begins with notes based on a special lecture by John Milnor about the history of the topology of manifolds. It also contains notes from lectures by Cameron Gordon on the basics of three-manifold topology and surgery problems, Mikhail Khovanov on his homological invariants for knots, John Etnyre on contact geometry, Ron Fintushel and Ron Stern on constructions of exotic four-manifolds, David Gabai on the hyperbolic geometry and the ending lamination theorem, Zoltan Szabo on Heegaard Floer homology for knots and three manifolds, and John Morgan on Hamilton's and Perelman's work on Ricci flow and geometrization.

Every eight years since 1961, the University of Georgia has hosted a major international topology conference aimed at disseminating important recent results and bringing together researchers at different stages of their careers. This volume contains the proceedings of the 2009 conference, which includes survey and research articles concerning such areas as knot theory, contact and symplectic topology, 3-manifold theory, geometric group theory, and equivariant topology. Among other highlights of the volume, a survey article by Stefan Friedl and Stefano Vidussi provides an accessible treatment of their important proof of Taubes' conjecture on symplectic structures on the product of a 3-manifold and a circle, and an intriguing short article by Dennis Sullivan opens the door to the use of modern algebraic-topological techniques in the study of finite-dimensional models of famously difficult problems in fluid dynamics. Continuing what has become a tradition, this volume contains a report on a problem session held at the conference, discussing a variety of open problems in geometric topology.

The goal of these notes is to provide a fast introduction to symplectic geometry for graduate students with some knowledge of differential geometry, de Rham theory and classical Lie groups. This text addresses symplectomorphisms, local forms, contact manifolds, compatible almost complex structures, Kaehler manifolds, hamiltonian mechanics, moment maps, symplectic reduction and symplectic toric manifolds. It contains guided problems, called homework, designed to complement the exposition or extend the reader's understanding. There are by now excellent references on symplectic geometry, a subset of which is in the bibliography of this book. However, the most efficient introduction to a subject is often a short elementary treatment, and these notes attempt to serve that purpose. This text provides a taste of areas of current research and will prepare the reader to explore recent papers and extensive books on symplectic geometry where the pace is much faster. For this reprint numerous corrections and clarifications have been made, and the layout has been improved.

The present publication contains a special collection of research and review articles on deformations of surface singularities, that put together serve as an introductory survey of results and methods of the theory, as well as open problems and examples. The aim is to collect material that will help mathematicians already working or wishing to work in this area to deepen their insight and eliminate the technical barriers in this learning process. Additionally, we introduce some material which emphasizes the newly found relationship with the theory of Stein fillings and symplectic geometry. This links two main theories of mathematics: low dimensional topology and algebraic geometry.​ The theory of normal surface singularities is a distinguished part of analytic or algebraic geometry with several important results, its own technical machinery, and several open problems. Recently several connections were established with low dimensional topology, symplectic geometry and theory of Stein fillings. This created an intense mathematical activity with spectacular bridges between the two areas. The theory of deformation of singularities is the key object in these connections.