Presents the first collection of articles consisting entirely of work by the faculty and students at the Higher Mathematics College at the Independent University of Moscow. The 11 contributions cover symmetry groups of regular polyhedra over finite fields, vector bundles on an elliptical curve and Skylanin algebras, Tutte decomposition for graphs and symmetric matrices, and invarians and homology of spaces of knots in arbitrary manifolds. The focus of the text is on quantum groups and low-dimensional topology. No index. Annotation copyrighted by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR.

This volume presents the first collection of articles consisting entirely of work by faculty and students of the Higher Mathematics College of the Independent University of Moscow (IUM). This unique institution was established to train elite students to become research scientists. Covered in the book are two main topics: quantum groups and low-dimensional topology. The articles were written by participants of the Feigin and Vassiliev seminars, two of the most active seminars at the IUM.

This book provides an extensive and self-contained presentation of quantum and related invariants of knots and 3-manifolds. Polynomial invariants of knots, such as the Jones and Alexander polynomials, are constructed as quantum invariants, i.e. invariants derived from representations of quantum groups and from the monodromy of solutions to the Knizhnik-Zamolodchikov equation. With the introduction of the Kontsevich invariant and the theory of Vassiliev invariants, the quantum invariants become well-organized. Quantum and perturbative invariants, the LMO invariant, and finite type invariants of 3-manifolds are discussed. The Chern-Simons field theory and the Wess-Zumino-Witten model are described as the physical background of the invariants.

This volume, devoted to the 70th birthday of A. L. Onishchik, contains a collection of articles by participants in the Moscow Seminar on Lie Groups and Invariant Theory headed by E. B. Vinberg and A. L. Onishchik. The book is suitable for graduate students and researchers interested in Lie groups and related topics.

This volume is the conference proceedings of the NATO ARW during August 2001 at Kananaskis Village, Canada on 'New Techniques in Topological Quantum Field Theory'. This conference brought together specialists from a number of different fields all related to Topological Quantum Field Theory. The theme of this conference was to attempt to find new methods in quantum topology from the interaction with specialists in these other fields. The featured articles include papers by V. Vassiliev on combinatorial formulas for cohomology of spaces of Knots, the computation of Ohtsuki series by N. Jacoby and R. Lawrence, and a paper by M. Asaeda and J. Przytycki on the torsion conjecture for Khovanov homology by Shumakovitch. Moreover, there are articles on more classical topics related to manifolds and braid groups by such well known authors as D. Rolfsen, H. Zieschang and F. Cohen.

The volume starts with a lecture course by P. Etingof on tensor categories (notes by D. Calaque). This course is an introduction to tensor categories, leading to topics of recent research such as realizability of fusion rings, Ocneanu rigidity, module categories, weak Hopf algebras, Morita theory for tensor categories, lifting theory, categorical dimensions, Frobenius-Perron dimensions, and the classification of tensor categories. The remainder of the book consists of three detailed expositions on associators and the Vassiliev invariants of knots, classical and quantum integrable systems and elliptic algebras, and the groups of algebra automorphisms of quantum groups. The preface puts the results presented in perspective. Directed at research mathematicians and theoretical physicists as well as graduate students, the volume gives an overview of the ongoing research in the domain of quantum groups, an important subject of current mathematical physics.

Singularities arise naturally in a huge number of different areas of mathematics and science. As a consequence, singularity theory lies at the crossroads of paths that connect many of the most important areas of applications of mathematics with some of its most abstract regions. The main goal in most problems of singularity theory is to understand the dependence of some objects of analysis, geometry, physics, or other science (functions, varieties, mappings, vector or tensor fields, differential equations, models, etc.) on parameters. The articles collected here can be grouped under three headings. (A) Singularities of real maps; (B) Singular complex variables; and (C) Singularities of homomorphic maps.