Description
Book SynopsisThis book provides the first lucid and accessible account to the modern study of the geometry of four-manifolds. It has become required reading for postgraduates and research workers whose research touches on this topic. Pre-requisites are a firm grounding in differential topology, and geometry as may be gained from the first year of a graduate course. The subject matter of this book is the most significant breakthrough in mathematics of the last fifty years, and Professor Donaldson won a Fields medal for his work in the area. The authors start from the standpoint that the fundamental group and intersection form of a four-manifold provides information about its homology and characteristic classes, but little of its differential topology. It turns out that the classification up to diffeomorphism of four-manifolds is very different from the classification of unimodular forms and that the study of this question leads naturally to the new Donaldson invariants of four-manifolds. A central t
Trade Review... authoritative and comprehensive... it must be regarded as compulsory reading for any young researcher approaching this difficult but fascinating area. * Bulletin of the London Mathematical Society *
Table of Contents1. Four-manifolds ; 2. Connections ; 3. The Fourier transform and ADHM construction ; 4. Yang-Mills moduli spaces ; 5. Topology and connections ; 6. Stable holomorphic bundles over Kahler surfaces ; 7. Excision and glueing ; 8. Non-existence results ; 9. Invariants of smooth four-manifolds ; 10. The differential topology of algebraic surfaces ; Appendix ; References ; Index
