These lecture notes discusses the developments both in the theoretical understanding of the physics and mathematics of magnetic monopoles as well as the ways in which they can be detected experimentally.The subject has now become highly interdisciplinary and recent monopole meetings have attracted participants from low temperature physics at one extreme to cosmology at the other.

These lecture notes discusses the developments both in the theoretical understanding of the physics and mathematics of magnetic monopoles as well as the ways in which they can be detected experimentally.The subject has now become highly interdisciplinary and recent monopole meetings have attracted participants from low temperature physics at one extreme to cosmology at the other.

Inflation has revolutionized cosmology primarily because it has eliminated the dependence of cosmological modelling on initial conditions. Thus inflationary cosmology is able to account for the present universe starting from a wide range of initial conditions. This volume reviews the presents state of subject. Each chapter consists of a brief introduction followed by reprints of important papers. Experts in the field are also provided with a unifying view point.

Surveys the monopole problem on a few different levels, from classical electrodynamics up to N=2 SUSY Yang-Mills theory. and presents a compact, `bird's eye view' on the entire set of problems related with very notion of monopole including actual stand of the problem, related historical remarks and comprehensive bibliography. Presents original results obtained by the author in collaboration with other researches are presented as well as it summarizes the present status of the theory of monopoles and provides an introduction to the field.