These proceedings comprise two workshops celebrating the accomplishments of David J. Benson on the occasion of his sixtieth birthday. The papers presented at the meetings were representative of the many mathematical subjects he has worked on, with an emphasis on group prepresentations and cohomology. The first workshop was titled "Groups, Representations, and Cohomology" and held from June 22 to June 27, 2015 at Sabhal Mòr Ostaig on the Isle of Skye, Scotland. The second was a combination of a summer school and workshop on the subject of "Geometric Methods in the Representation Theory of Finite Groups" and took place at the Pacific Institute for the Mathematical Sciences at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver from July 27 to August 5, 2016. The contents of the volume include a composite of both summer school material and workshop-derived survey articles on geometric and topological aspects of the representation theory of finite groups. The mission of the annually sponsored Summer Schools is to train and draw new students, and help Ph.D students transition to independent research.

These proceedings comprise two workshops celebrating the accomplishments of David J. Benson on the occasion of his sixtieth birthday. The papers presented at the meetings were representative of the many mathematical subjects he has worked on, with an emphasis on group prepresentations and cohomology. The first workshop was titled "Groups, Representations, and Cohomology" and held from June 22 to June 27, 2015 at Sabhal Mòr Ostaig on the Isle of Skye, Scotland. The second was a combination of a summer school and workshop on the subject of "Geometric Methods in the Representation Theory of Finite Groups" and took place at the Pacific Institute for the Mathematical Sciences at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver from July 27 to August 5, 2016. The contents of the volume include a composite of both summer school material and workshop-derived survey articles on geometric and topological aspects of the representation theory of finite groups. The mission of the annually sponsored Summer Schools is to train and draw new students, and help Ph. D students transition to independent research.

This volume contains the proceedings of the virtual AMS Special Session on Geometric and Algebraic Aspects of Quantum Groups and Related Topics, held from November 20–21, 2021. Noncommutative algebras and noncommutative algebraic geometry have been an active field of research for the past several decades, with many important applications in mathematical physics, representation theory, number theory, combinatorics, geometry, low-dimensional topology, and category theory. Papers in this volume contain original research, written by speakers and their collaborators. Many papers also discuss new concepts with detailed examples and current trends with novel and important results, all of which are invaluable contributions to the mathematics community.

Coxeter groups are groups generated by reflections, and they appear throughout mathematics. Tits developed the general theory of Coxeter groups in order to develop the theory of buildings. Buildings have interrelated algebraic, combinatorial and geometric structures, and are powerful tools for understanding the groups which act on them. These notes focus on the geometry and topology of Coxeter groups and buildings, especially nonspherical cases. The emphasis is on geometric intuition, and there are many examples and illustrations. Part I describes Coxeter groups and their geometric realisations, particularly the Davis complex, and Part II gives a concise introduction to buildings. This book will be suitable for mathematics graduate students and researchers in geometric group theory, as well as algebra and combinatorics. The assumed background is basic group theory, including group actions, and basic algebraic topology, together with some knowledge of Riemannian geometry.

Kac-Moody Lie algebras 9 were introduced in the mid-1960s independently by V. Kac and R. Moody, generalizing the finite-dimensional semisimple Lie alge bras which we refer to as the finite case. The theory has undergone tremendous developments in various directions and connections with diverse areas abound, including mathematical physics, so much so that this theory has become a stan dard tool in mathematics. A detailed treatment of the Lie algebra aspect of the theory can be found in V. Kac's book [Kac-90l This self-contained work treats the algebro-geometric and the topological aspects of Kac-Moody theory from scratch. The emphasis is on the study of the Kac-Moody groups 9 and their flag varieties XY, including their detailed construction, and their applications to the representation theory of g. In the finite case, 9 is nothing but a semisimple Y simply-connected algebraic group and X is the flag variety 9 /Py for a parabolic subgroup p y C g.

Group cohomology has a rich history that goes back a century or more. Its origins are rooted in investigations of group theory and num ber theory, and it grew into an integral component of algebraic topology. In the last thirty years, group cohomology has developed a powerful con nection with finite group representations. Unlike the early applications which were primarily concerned with cohomology in low degrees, the in teractions with representation theory involve cohomology rings and the geometry of spectra over these rings. It is this connection to represen tation theory that we take as our primary motivation for this book. The book consists of two separate pieces. Chronologically, the first part was the computer calculations of the mod-2 cohomology rings of the groups whose orders divide 64. The ideas and the programs for the calculations were developed over the last 10 years. Several new features were added over the course of that time. We had originally planned to include only a brief introduction to the calculations. However, we were persuaded to produce a more substantial text that would include in greater detail the concepts that are the subject of the calculations and are the source of some of the motivating conjectures for the com putations. We have gathered together many of the results and ideas that are the focus of the calculations from throughout the mathematical literature.

This book collects the scientific contributions of a group of leading experts who took part in the INdAM Meeting held in Cortona in September 2014. With combinatorial techniques as the central theme, it focuses on recent developments in configuration spaces from various perspectives. It also discusses their applications in areas ranging from representation theory, toric geometry and geometric group theory to applied algebraic topology.