New Trends In Geometry

This volume focuses on the interactions between mathematics, physics, biology and neuroscience by exploring new geometrical and topological modelling in these fields. Among the highlights are the central roles played by multilevel and scale-change approaches in these disciplines. The integration of mathematics with physics, as well as molecular and cell biology and the neurosciences, will constitute the new frontier of 21st century science, where breakthroughs are more likely to span across traditional disciplines.

This volume focuses on the interactions between mathematics, physics, biology and neuroscience by exploring new geometrical and topological modelling in these fields. Among the highlights are the central roles played by multilevel and scale-change approaches in these disciplines. The integration of mathematics with physics, as well as molecular and cell biology and the neurosciences, will constitute the new frontier of 21st century science, where breakthroughs are more likely to span across traditional disciplines. Contents:Geometry, Theoretical Physics and Cosmology:The Emergence of Algebraic Geometry in Contemporary Physics (Claudio Bartocci & Ugo Bruzzo)Quantum Gravity and Quantum Geometry (Mauro Carfora)The de Sitter and Anti-de Sitter Universes (Ugo Moschella)Geometry and Topology in Relativistic Cosmology (Jean-Pierre Luminet)The Problem of Space in Neurosciences:Space Coding in the Cerebral Cortex (Leonardo Fogassi)Action and Space Representation (Anna Berti & Alessia Folegatti)The Space Representations in the Brain (Claudio Brozzoli & Alessandro Farnè)The Enactive Constitution of Space (Carrado Sinigaglia & Chiara Brozzo)Geometrical Methods in the Biological Sciences:Causes and Symmetries in Natural Sciences: The Continuum and the Discrete in Mathematical Modelling (Francis Bailly & Giuseppe Longo)Topological Invariants of Geometrical Surfaces and the Protein Folding Problem (Riccardo Broglia)The Geometry of Dense Packing and Biological Structures (Jean-François Sadoc)When Topology and Biology Meet ‘For Life’: The Interactions Between Topological Forms and Biological Functions (Luciano Boi) Readership: Students and researchers in mathematical sciences at graduate level. Keywords:Geometrical Models;Spatial Perception;Mirror Neurons;Quantum Field Theory;String TheoryKey Features:Multidisciplinary approachDistinguished contributors working in different research areasNovel perspectives on the interactions between mathematics and biology

This book is the outcome of the 1996 Warwick Algebraic Geometry EuroConference, containing 17 survey and research articles selected from the most outstanding contemporary research topics in algebraic geometry. Several of the articles are expository: among these a beautiful short exposition by Paranjape of the new and very simple approach to the resolution of singularities; a detailed essay by Ito and Nakamura on the ubiquitous A,D,E classification, centred around simple surface singularities; a discussion by Morrison of the new special Lagrangian approach to giving geometric foundations to mirror symmetry; and two deep, informative surveys by Siebert and Behrend on Gromow-Witten invariants treating them from the point of view of algebraic and symplectic geometry. The remaining articles cover a wide cross-section of the most significant research topics in algebraic geometry. This includes Gromow-Witten invariants, Hodge theory, Calabi-Yau 3-folds, mirror symmetry and classification of varieties.

This book includes four courses on geometric measure theory, the calculus of variations, partial differential equations, and differential geometry. Authored by leading experts in their fields, the lectures present different approaches to research topics with the common background of a relevant underlying, usually non-Riemannian, geometric structure. In particular, the topics covered concern differentiation and functions of bounded variation in metric spaces, Sobolev spaces, and differential geometry in the so-called Carnot–Carathéodory spaces. The text is based on lectures presented at the 10th School on "Analysis and Geometry in Metric Spaces" held in Levico Terme (TN), Italy, in collaboration with the University of Trento, Fondazione Bruno Kessler and CIME, Italy. The book is addressed to both graduate students and researchers.

This volume contains 17 surveys that cover many recent developments in Discrete Geometry and related fields. Besides presenting the state-of-the-art of classical research subjects like packing and covering, it also offers an introduction to new topological, algebraic and computational methods in this very active research field. The readers will find a variety of modern topics and many fascinating open problems that may serve as starting points for research.

This unique mathematical volume brings together geometers, analysts, differential equations specialists and graph-theorists to provide a glimpse on recent mathematical trends whose commonalities have hitherto remained, for the most part, unnoticed. The applied mathematician will be pleasantly surprised with the interpretation of a voting system in terms of the fixed points of a mapping given in the book, as much as the classical analyst will be enthusiastic to find detailed discussions on the generalization of the notion of metric space, in which the metric takes values on an abstract monoid. Classical themes on fixed point theory are adapted to the diverse setting of graph theory, thus uncovering a set of tools whose power and versatility will be appreciated by mathematicians working on either area. The volume also includes recent results on variable exponent spaces which reveal much-needed connections with partial differential equations, while the incipient field of variational inequalities on manifolds, also explored here, will be of interest to researchers from a variety of fields.

Traditionally, Lorentzian geometry has been used as a necessary tool to understand general relativity, as well as to explore new genuine geometric behaviors, far from classical Riemannian techniques. Recent progress has attracted a renewed interest in this theory for many researchers: long-standing global open problems have been solved, outstanding Lorentzian spaces and groups have been classified, new applications to mathematical relativity and high energy physics have been found, and further connections with other geometries have been developed. Samples of these fresh trends are presented in this volume, based on contributions from the VI International Meeting on Lorentzian Geometry, held at the University of Granada, Spain, in September, 2011. Topics such as geodesics, maximal, trapped and constant mean curvature submanifolds, classifications of manifolds with relevant symmetries, relations between Lorentzian and Finslerian geometries, and applications to mathematical physics are included. ​ This book will be suitable for a broad audience of differential geometers, mathematical physicists and relativists, and researchers in the field.

Discrete and computational geometry are two fields which in recent years have benefitted from the interaction between mathematics and computer science. The results are applicable in areas such as motion planning, robotics, scene analysis, and computer aided design. The book consists of twelve chapters summarizing the most recent results and methods in discrete and computational geometry. All authors are well-known experts in these fields. They give concise and self-contained surveys of the most efficient combinatorical, probabilistic and topological methods that can be used to design effective geometric algorithms for the applications mentioned above. Most of the methods and results discussed in the book have not appeared in any previously published monograph. In particular, this book contains the first systematic treatment of epsilon-nets, geometric tranversal theory, partitions of Euclidean spaces and a general method for the analysis of randomized geometric algorithms. Apart from mathematicians working in discrete and computational geometry this book will also be of great use to computer scientists and engineers, who would like to learn about the most recent results.