Porter Lectures

There is a well-known correspondence between the objects of algebra and geometry: a space gives rise to a function algebra; a vector bundle over the space corresponds to a projective module over this algebra; cohomology can be read off the de Rham complex; and so on. In this book Yuri Manin addresses a variety of instances in which the application of commutative algebra cannot be used to describe geometric objects, emphasizing the recent upsurge of activity in studying noncommutative rings as if they were function rings on "noncommutative spaces." Manin begins by summarizing and giving examples of some of the ideas that led to the new concepts of noncommutative geometry, such as Connes' noncommutative de Rham complex, supergeometry, and quantum groups. He then discusses supersymmetric algebraic curves that arose in connection with superstring theory; examines superhomogeneous spaces, their Schubert cells, and superanalogues of Weyl groups; and provides an introduction to quantum groups. This book is intended for mathematicians and physicists with some background in Lie groups and complex geometry.

Originally published in 1991.

The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.

Systems governed by non-linear differential equations are of fundamental importance in all branches of science, but our understanding of them is still extremely limited. In this book a particular system, describing the interaction of magnetic monopoles, is investigated in detail. The use of new geometrical methods produces a reasonably clear picture of the dynamics for slowly moving monopoles. This picture clarifies the important notion of solitons, which has attracted much attention in recent years. The soliton idea bridges the gap between the concepts of "fields" and "particles," and is here explored in a fully three-dimensional context. While the background and motivation for the work comes from physics, the presentation is mathematical.

This book is interdisciplinary and addresses concerns of theoretical physicists interested in elementary particles or general relativity and mathematicians working in analysis or geometry. The interaction between geometry and physics through non-linear partial differential equations is now at a very exciting stage, and the book is a contribution to this activity.

Originally published in 1988.

The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.

The aim of this book is to study various geometric properties and algebraic invariants of smooth projective varieties with infinite fundamental groups. This approach allows for much interplay between methods of algebraic geometry, complex analysis, the theory of harmonic maps, and topology. Making systematic use of Shafarevich maps, a concept previously introduced by the author, this work isolates those varieties where the fundamental group influences global properties of the canonical class.

The book is primarily geared toward researchers and graduate students in algebraic geometry who are interested in the structure and classification theory of algebraic varieties. There are, however, presentations of many other applications involving other topics as well--such as Abelian varieties, theta functions, and automorphic forms on bounded domains. The methods are drawn from diverse sources, including Atiyah's L2 -index theorem, Gromov's theory of Poincaré series, and recent generalizations of Kodaira's vanishing theorem.

Originally published in 1995.

The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.

This book presents a comprehensive overview of the sum rule approach to spectral analysis of orthogonal polynomials, which derives from Gábor Szego's classic 1915 theorem and its 1920 extension. Barry Simon emphasizes necessary and sufficient conditions, and provides mathematical background that until now has been available only in journals. Topics include background from the theory of meromorphic functions on hyperelliptic surfaces and the study of covering maps of the Riemann sphere with a finite number of slits removed. This allows for the first book-length treatment of orthogonal polynomials for measures supported on a finite number of intervals on the real line.


In addition to the Szego and Killip-Simon theorems for orthogonal polynomials on the unit circle (OPUC) and orthogonal polynomials on the real line (OPRL), Simon covers Toda lattices, the moment problem, and Jacobi operators on the Bethe lattice. Recent work on applications of universality of the CD kernel to obtain detailed asymptotics on the fine structure of the zeros is also included. The book places special emphasis on OPRL, which makes it the essential companion volume to the author's earlier books on OPUC.

This book is the first to present a new area of mathematical research that combines topology, geometry, and logic. Shmuel Weinberger seeks to explain and illustrate the implications of the general principle, first emphasized by Alex Nabutovsky, that logical complexity engenders geometric complexity. He provides applications to the problem of closed geodesics, the theory of submanifolds, and the structure of the moduli space of isometry classes of Riemannian metrics with curvature bounds on a given manifold. Ultimately, geometric complexity of a moduli space forces functions defined on that space to have many critical points, and new results about the existence of extrema or equilibria follow.


The main sort of algorithmic problem that arises is recognition: is the presented object equivalent to some standard one? If it is difficult to determine whether the problem is solvable, then the original object has doppelgängers--that is, other objects that are extremely difficult to distinguish from it.


Many new questions emerge about the algorithmic nature of known geometric theorems, about "dichotomy problems," and about the metric entropy of moduli space. Weinberger studies them using tools from group theory, computability, differential geometry, and topology, all of which he explains before use. Since several examples are worked out, the overarching principles are set in a clear relief that goes beyond the details of any one problem.