From the reviews of the first edition: "This book exposes the beautiful confluence of deep techniques and ideas from mathematical physics and the topological study of the differentiable structure of compact four-dimensional manifolds, compact spaces locally modeled on the world in which we live and operate... The book is filled with insightful remarks, proofs, and contributions that have never before appeared in print. For anyone attempting to understand the work of Donaldson and the applications of gauge theories to four-dimensional topology, the book is a must." #Science#1 "I would strongly advise the graduate student or working mathematician who wishes to learn the analytic aspects of this subject to begin with Freed and Uhlenbeck's book." #Bulletin of the American Mathematical Society#2

This book is the outcome of a seminar organized by Michael Freedman and Karen Uhlenbeck (the senior author) at the Mathematical Sciences Research Institute in Berkeley during its first few months of existence. Dan Freed (the junior author) was originally appointed as notetaker. The express purpose of the seminar was to go through a proof of Simon Donaldson's Theorem, which had been announced the previous spring. Donaldson proved the nonsmoothability of certain topological four-manifolds; a year earlier Freedman had constructed these manifolds as part of his solution to the four dimensional ; Poincare conjecture. The spectacular application of Donaldson's and Freedman's theorems to the existence of fake 1R4,s made headlines (insofar as mathematics ever makes headlines). Moreover, Donaldson proved his theorem in topology by studying the solution space of equations the Yang-Mills equations which come from ultra-modern physics. The philosophical implications are unavoidable: we mathematicians need physics! The seminar was initially very well attended. Unfortunately, we found after three months that we had covered most of the published material, but had made little real progress towards giving a complete, detailed proof. Mter joint work extending over three cities and 3000 miles, this book now provides such a proof. The seminar bogged down in the hard analysis (56 59), which also takes up most of Donaldson's paper (in less detail). As we proceeded it became clear to us that the techniques in partial differential equations used in the proof differ strikingly from the geometric and topological material.

This book is the outcome of a seminar organized by Michael Freedman and Karen Uhlenbeck (the senior author) at the Mathematical Sciences Research Institute in Berkeley during its first few months of existence. Dan Freed (the junior author) was originally appointed as notetaker. The express purpose of the seminar was to go through a proof of Simon Donaldson's Theorem, which had been announced the previous spring. Donaldson proved the nonsmoothability of certain topological four-manifolds; a year earlier Freedman had constructed these manifolds as part of his solution to the four dimensional ; Poincare conjecture. The spectacular application of Donaldson's and Freedman's theorems to the existence of fake 1R4,s made headlines (insofar as mathematics ever makes headlines). Moreover, Donaldson proved his theorem in topology by studying the solution space of equations the Yang-Mills equations which come from ultra-modern physics. The philosophical implications are unavoidable: we mathematicians need physics! The seminar was initially very well attended. Unfortunately, we found after three months that we had covered most of the published material, but had made little real progress towards giving a complete, detailed proof. Mter joint work extending over three cities and 3000 miles, this book now provides such a proof. The seminar bogged down in the hard analysis (56 59), which also takes up most of Donaldson's paper (in less detail). As we proceeded it became clear to us that the techniques in partial differential equations used in the proof differ strikingly from the geometric and topological material.

This text provides an accessible account to the modern study of the geometry of four-manifolds. Prerequisites are a firm grounding in differential topology and geometry, as may be gained from the first year of a graduate course.

The recent introduction of the Seiberg-Witten invariants of smooth four-manifolds has revolutionized the study of those manifolds. The invariants are gauge-theoretic in nature and are close cousins of the much-studied SU(2)-invariants defined over fifteen years ago by Donaldson. On a practical level, the new invariants have proved to be more powerful and have led to a vast generalization of earlier results. This book is an introduction to the Seiberg-Witten invariants. The work begins with a review of the classical material on Spin c structures and their associated Dirac operators. Next comes a discussion of the Seiberg-Witten equations, which is set in the context of nonlinear elliptic operators on an appropriate infinite dimensional space of configurations. It is demonstrated that the space of solutions to these equations, called the Seiberg-Witten moduli space, is finite dimensional, and its dimension is then computed. In contrast to the SU(2)-case, the Seiberg-Witten moduli spaces are shown to be compact. The Seiberg-Witten invariant is then essentially the homology class in the space of configurations represented by the Seiberg-Witten moduli space. The last chapter gives a flavor for the applications of these new invariants by computing the invariants for most Kahler surfaces and then deriving some basic toological consequences for these surfaces.

This book presents the topology of smooth 4-manifolds in an intuitive self-contained way, developed over a number of years by Professor Akbulut. The text is aimed at graduate students and focuses on the teaching and learning of the subject, giving a direct approach to constructions and theorems which are supplemented by exercises to help the reader work through the details not covered in the proofs. The book contains a hundred colour illustrations to demonstrate the ideas rather than providing long-winded and potentially unclear explanations. Key results have been selected that relate to the material discussed and the author has provided examples of how to analyse them with the techniques developed in earlier chapters.