The goal of this book is to present a portrait of the n n-dimensional Cremona group with an emphasis on the 2-dimensional case. After recalling some crucial tools, the book describes a naturally defined infinite dimensional hyperbolic space on which the Cremona group acts. This space plays a fundamental role in the study of Cremona groups, as it allows one to apply tools from geometric group theory to explore properties of the subgroups of the Cremona group as well as the degree growth and dynamical behavior of birational transformations. The book describes natural topologies on the Cremona group, codifies the notion of algebraic subgroups of the Cremona groups and finishes with a chapter on the dynamics of their actions. This book is aimed at graduate students and researchers in algebraic geometry who are interested in birational geometry and its interactions with geometric group theory and dynamical systems.

Cremona Groups and the Icosahedron focuses on the Cremona groups of ranks 2 and 3 and describes the beautiful appearances of the icosahedral group A5 in them. The book surveys known facts about surfaces with an action of A5, explores A5-equivariant geometry of the quintic del Pezzo threefold V5, and gives a proof of its A5-birational rigidity.The a

EMAlgebra, Arithmetic, and Geometry: In Honor of Yu. I. ManinEM consists of invited expository and research articles on new developments arising from Manin’s outstanding contributions to mathematics.

This book is the tenth in a series of volumes whose aim is to provide a complete proof of the classification theorem for the finite simple groups based on a fairly short and clearly enumerated set of background results. Specifically, this book completes our identification of the simple groups of bicharacteristic type begun in the ninth volume of the series (see SURV/40.9). This is a fascinating set of simple groups which have properties in common with matrix groups (or, more generally, groups of Lie type) defined both over fields of characteristic 2 and over fields of characteristic 3. This set includes 11 of the celebrated 26 sporadic simple groups along with several of their large simple subgroups. Together with SURV/40.9, this volume provides the first unified treatment of this class of simple groups.

The main topic of the book is amenable groups, i.e., groups on which there exist invariant finitely additive measures. It was discovered that the existence or non-existence of amenability is responsible for many interesting phenomena such as, e.g., the Banach-Tarski Paradox about breaking a sphere into two spheres of the same radius. Since then, amenability has been actively studied and a number of different approaches resulted in many examples of amenable and non-amenable groups. In the book, the author puts together main approaches to study amenability. A novel feature of the book is that the exposition of the material starts with examples which introduce a method rather than illustrating it. This allows the reader to quickly move on to meaningful material without learning and remembering a lot of additional definitions and preparatory results; those are presented after analyzing the main examples. The techniques that are used for proving amenability in this book are mainly a combination of analytic and probabilistic tools with geometric group theory.