In 2003, Kechris, Pestov and Todorcevic showed that the structure of certain separable metric spaces--called ultrahomogeneous--is closely related to the combinatorial behavior of the class of their finite metric spaces. The purpose of the present paper is to explore different aspects of this connection.

Asymptotic Geometric Analysis is concerned with the geometric and linear properties of finite dimensional objects, normed spaces, and convex bodies, especially with the asymptotics of their various quantitative parameters as the dimension tends to infinity. The deep geometric, probabilistic, and combinatorial methods developed here are used outside the field in many areas of mathematics and mathematical sciences. The Fields Institute Thematic Program in the Fall of 2010 continued an established tradition of previous large-scale programs devoted to the same general research direction. The main directions of the program included: * Asymptotic theory of convexity and normed spaces * Concentration of measure and isoperimetric inequalities, optimal transportation approach * Applications of the concept of concentration * Connections with transformation groups and Ramsey theory * Geometrization of probability * Random matrices * Connection with asymptotic combinatorics and complexity theory These directions are represented in this volume and reflect the present state of this important area of research. It will be of benefit to researchers working in a wide range of mathematical sciences—in particular functional analysis, combinatorics, convex geometry, dynamical systems, operator algebras, and computer science.

The author unifies various constructions of $C^*$-algebras from dynamical systems, specifically, the dimension group construction of Krieger for shift spaces, the corresponding constructions of Wagoner and Boyle, Fiebig and Fiebig for countable state Markov shifts and one-sided shift spaces, respectively, and the constructions of Ruelle and Putnam for Smale spaces. The general setup is used to analyze the structure of the $C^*$-algebras arising from the homoclinic and heteroclinic equivalence relations in expansive dynamical systems, in particular, expansive group endomorphisms and automorphisms and generalized 1-solenoids. For these dynamical systems it is shown that the $C^*$-algebras are inductive limits of homogeneous or sub-homogeneous algebras with one-dimensional spectra.

Let M be either a topological manifold, a Hilbert cube manifold, or a Menger manifold and let D be an arbitrary countable dense subset of M. Consider the topological group H(M,D) which consists of all autohomeomorphisms of M that map D onto itself equipped with the compact-open topology. We present a complete solution to the topological classification problem for H(M,D) as follows. If M is a one-dimensional topological manifold, then we proved in an earlier paper that H(M,D) is homeomorphic to Qω, the countable power of the space of rational numbers. In all other cases we find in this paper that H(M,D) is homeomorphic to the famed Erdős space E E, which consists of the vectors in Hilbert space l2 with rational coordinates. We obtain the second result by developing topological characterizations of Erdős space.

Let G be a simple algebraic group defined over an algebraically closed field k whose characteristic is either 0 or a good prime for G, and let uEG be unipotent. The authors study the centralizer CG(u), especially its centre Z(CG(u)). They calculate the Lie algebra of Z(CG(u)), in particular determining its dimension; they prove a succession of theorems of increasing generality, the last of which provides a formula for dim Z(CG(u)) in terms of the labelled diagram associated to the conjugacy class containing u.

The author gives a complete topological classification for germs of one-parameter families of one-dimensional complex analytic diffeomorphisms without small divisors. In the non-trivial cases the topological invariants are given by some functions attached to the fixed points set plus the analytic class of the element of the family corresponding to the special parameter. The proof is based on the structure of the limits of orbits when we approach the special parameter.

The authors provide a complete classification of the radial solutions to a class of reaction diffusion equations arising in the study of thermal structures such as plasmas with thermal equilibrium or no flux at the boundary. In particular, their study includes rapidly growing nonlinearities, that is, those where an exponent exceeds the critical exponent. They describe the corresponding bifurcation diagrams and determine existence and uniqueness of ground states, which play a central role in characterizing those diagrams. They also provide information on the stability-unstability of the radial steady states.