The new edition of this celebrated and long-unavailable book preserves the original book's content and structure and its unrivalled presentation of a universal method for the resolution of a class of singularities in algebraic geometry.

The new edition of this celebrated and long-unavailable book preserves the original book's content and structure and its unrivalled presentation of a universal method for the resolution of a class of singularities in algebraic geometry. At the same time, the book has been completely re-typeset, errors have been eliminated, proofs have been streamlined, the notation has been made consistent and uniform, an index has been added, and a guide to recent literature has been added. The book brings together ideas from algebraic geometry, differential geometry, representation theory and number theory, and will continue to prove of value for researchers and graduate students in these areas.

Introduces uniform constructions of most of the known compactifications of symmetric and locally symmetric spaces, with emphasis on their geometric and topological structures Relatively self-contained reference aimed at graduate students and research mathematicians interested in the applications of Lie theory and representation theory to analysis, number theory, algebraic geometry and algebraic topology

This book is a comprehensive treatise on the partial toroidal and minimal compactifications of the ordinary loci of PEL-type Shimura varieties and Kuga families, and on the canonical and subcanonical extensions of automorphic bundles. The results in this book serve as the logical foundation of several recent developments in the theory of p-adic automorphic forms; and of the author's work with Harris, Taylor, and Thorne on the construction of Galois representations without any polarizability conditions, which is a major breakthrough in the Langlands program.This book is important for active researchers and graduate students who need to understand the above-mentioned recent works, and is written with such users of the theory in mind, providing plenty of explanations and background materials, which should be helpful for people working in similar areas. It also contains precise internal and external references, and an index of notation and terminologies. These are useful for readers to quickly locate materials they need.

The concept of symmetric space is of central importance in many branches of mathematics. Compactifications of these spaces have been studied from the points of view of representation theory, geometry, and random walks. This work is devoted to the study of the interrelationships among these various compactifications and, in particular, focuses on the martin compactifications. It is the first exposition to treat compactifications of symmetric spaces systematically and to uniformized the various points of view. The work is largely self-contained, with comprehensive references to the literature. It is an excellent resource for both researchers and graduate students.

By studying the degeneration of abelian varieties with PEL structures, this book explains the compactifications of smooth integral models of all PEL-type Shimura varieties, providing the logical foundation for several exciting recent developments. The book is designed to be accessible to graduate students who have an understanding of schemes and abelian varieties. PEL-type Shimura varieties, which are natural generalizations of modular curves, are useful for studying the arithmetic properties of automorphic forms and automorphic representations, and they have played important roles in the development of the Langlands program. As with modular curves, it is desirable to have integral models of compactifications of PEL-type Shimura varieties that can be described in sufficient detail near the boundary. This book explains in detail the following topics about PEL-type Shimura varieties and their compactifications: A construction of smooth integral models of PEL-type Shimura varieties by defining and representing moduli problems of abelian schemes with PEL structures An analysis of the degeneration of abelian varieties with PEL structures into semiabelian schemes, over noetherian normal complete adic base rings A construction of toroidal and minimal compactifications of smooth integral models of PEL-type Shimura varieties, with detailed descriptions of their structure near the boundary Through these topics, the book generalizes the theory of degenerations of polarized abelian varieties and the application of that theory to the construction of toroidal and minimal compactifications of Siegel moduli schemes over the integers (as developed by Mumford, Faltings, and Chai).