Abelian Coverings Of The Complex Projective Plane Branched Along

This work studies abelian branched coverings of smooth complex projective surfaces from the topological viewpoint. Geometric information about the coverings (such as the first Betti numbers of a smooth model or intersections of embedded curves) is related to topological and combinatorial information about the base space and branch locus. Special attention is given to examples in which the base space is the complex projective plane and the branch locus is a configuration of lines.

This work studies abelian branched coverings of smooth complex projective surfaces from the topological viewpoint. Geometric information about the coverings (such as the first Betti numbers of a smooth model or intersections of embedded curves) is related to topological and combinatorial information about the base space and branch locus. Special attention is given to examples in which the base space is the complex projective plane and the branch locus is a configuration of lines.

This volume comprises lecture notes, survey and research articles originating from the CIMPA Summer School Arithmetic and Geometry around Hypergeometric Functions held at Galatasaray University, Istanbul, June 13-25, 2005. It covers a wide range of topics related to hypergeometric functions, thus giving a broad perspective of the state of the art in the field.

This textbook provides an accessible introduction to the rich and beautiful area of hyperplane arrangement theory, where discrete mathematics, in the form of combinatorics and arithmetic, meets continuous mathematics, in the form of the topology and Hodge theory of complex algebraic varieties. The topics discussed in this book range from elementary combinatorics and discrete geometry to more advanced material on mixed Hodge structures, logarithmic connections and Milnor fibrations. The author covers a lot of ground in a relatively short amount of space, with a focus on defining concepts carefully and giving proofs of theorems in detail where needed. Including a number of surprising results and tantalizing open problems, this timely book also serves to acquaint the reader with the rapidly expanding literature on the subject. Hyperplane Arrangements will be particularly useful to graduate students and researchers who are interested in algebraic geometry or algebraic topology. The book contains numerous exercises at the end of each chapter, making it suitable for courses as well as self-study.

This book develops stochastic integration with respect to ``Brownian trees'' and its associated stochastic calculus, with the aim of proving pathwise existence and uniqueness in a stochastic equation driven by a historical Brownian motion. Perkins uses these results and a Girsanov-type theorem to prove that the martingale problem for the historical process associated with a wide class of interactive branching measure-valued diffusions (superprocesses) is well posed. The resulting measure-valued processes will arise as limits of the empirical measures of branching particle systems in which particles interact through their spatial motions or, to a lesser extent, through their branching rates.

These proceedings contain the contributions of some of the participants in the "intensive research period" held at the De Giorgi Research Center in Pisa, during the period May-June 2010. The central theme of this research period was the study of configuration spaces from various points of view. This topic originated from the intersection of several classical theories: Braid groups and related topics, configurations of vectors (of great importance in Lie theory and representation theory), arrangements of hyperplanes and of subspaces, combinatorics, singularity theory. Recently, however, configuration spaces have acquired independent interest and indeed the contributions in this volume go far beyond the above subjects, making it attractive to a large audience of mathematicians.

This volume contains invited expository and research papers from the conference Topology of Algebraic Varieties, in honour of Anatoly Libgober's 60th birthday, held June 22-26, 2009, in Jaca, Spain.