To view the abstract go to http://www.ams.org/books/memo/1166.

This volume contains the proceedings of the 2016 Summer School on Fractal Geometry and Complex Dimensions, in celebration of Michel L. Lapidus's 60th birthday, held from June 21–29, 2016, at California Polytechnic State University, San Luis Obispo, California. The theme of the contributions is fractals and dynamics and content is split into four parts, centered around the following themes: Dimension gaps and the mass transfer principle, fractal strings and complex dimensions, Laplacians on fractal domains and SDEs with fractal noise, and aperiodic order (Delone sets and tilings).

The localization technique from convex geometry is generalized to the setting of Riemannian manifolds whose Ricci curvature is bounded from below. In a nutshell, the author's method is based on the following observation: When the Ricci curvature is non-negative, log-concave measures are obtained when conditioning the Riemannian volume measure with respect to a geodesic foliation that is orthogonal to the level sets of a Lipschitz function. The Monge mass transfer problem plays an important role in the author's analysis.

The author discusses in which sense general metric measure spaces possess a first order differential structure. Building on this, spaces with Ricci curvature bounded from below a second order calculus can be developed, permitting the author to define Hessian, covariant/exterior derivatives and Ricci curvature.

In this article the authors develop a new method to deal with maximal Cohen–Macaulay modules over non–isolated surface singularities. In particular, they give a negative answer on an old question of Schreyer about surface singularities with only countably many indecomposable maximal Cohen–Macaulay modules. Next, the authors prove that the degenerate cusp singularities have tame Cohen–Macaulay representation type. The authors' approach is illustrated on the case of k as well as several other rings. This study of maximal Cohen–Macaulay modules over non–isolated singularities leads to a new class of problems of linear algebra, which the authors call representations of decorated bunches of chains. They prove that these matrix problems have tame representation type and describe the underlying canonical forms.

In this paper the authors start with the construction of the symplectic field theory (SFT). As a general theory of symplectic invariants, SFT has been outlined in Introduction to symplectic field theory (2000), by Y. Eliashberg, A. Givental and H. Hofer who have predicted its formal properties. The actual construction of SFT is a hard analytical problem which will be overcome be means of the polyfold theory due to the present authors. The current paper addresses a significant amount of the arising issues and the general theory will be completed in part II of this paper. To illustrate the polyfold theory the authors use the results of the present paper to describe an alternative construction of the Gromov-Witten invariants for general compact symplectic manifolds.