Proceedings Of The Conference On Transformation Groups

These Proceedings contain articles based on the lectures and in formal discussions at the Conference on Transformation Groups held at Tulane University, May 8 to June 2, 1967 under the sponsorship of the Advanced Science Seminar Projects of the National Science Foun dation (Contract No. GZ 400). They differ, however, from many such Conference proceedings in that particular emphasis has been given to the review and exposition of the state of the theory in its various mani festations, and the suggestion of direction to further research, rather than purely on the publication of research papers. That is not to say that there is no new material contained herein. On the contrary, there is an abundance of new material, many new ideas, new questions, and new conjectures~arefully incorporated within the framework of the theory as the various authors see it. An original objective of the Conference and of this report was to supply a much needed review of and supplement to the theory since the publication of the three standard works, MONTGOMERY and ZIPPIN, Topological Transformation Groups, Interscience Pub lishers, 1955, BOREL et aI. , Seminar on Transformation Groups, Annals of Math. Surveys, 1960, and CONNER and FLOYD, Differen tial Periodic Maps, Springer-Verlag, 1964. Considering this objective ambitious enough, it was decided to limit the survey to that part of Transformation Group Theory derived from the Montgomery School.

This is an account of the theory of certain types of compact transformation groups, namely those that are susceptible to study using ordinary cohomology theory and rational homotopy theory, which in practice means the torus groups and elementary abelian p-groups. The efforts of many mathematicians have combined to bring a depth of understanding to this area. However to make it reasonably accessible to a wide audience, the authors have streamlined the presentation, referring the reader to the literature for purely technical results and working in a simplified setting where possible. In this way the reader with a relatively modest background in algebraic topology and homology theory can penetrate rather deeply into the subject, whilst the book at the same time makes a useful reference for the more specialised reader.

Not merely an account of new results, this book is also a guide to motivation behind present work and potential future developments. Readers can obtain an overall understanding of the sorts of problems one studies in group actions and the methods used to study such problems. The book will be accessible to advanced graduate students who have had the equivalent of three semesters of graduate courses in topology; some previous acquaintance with the fundamentals of transformation groups is also highly desirable. The articles in this book are mainly based upon lectures at the 1983 AMS-IMS-SIAM Joint Summer Research Conference, Group Actions on Manifolds, held at the University of Colorado. A major objective was to provide an overall account of current knowledge in transformation groups; a number of survey articles describe the present state of the subject from several complementary perspectives. The book also contains some research articles, generally dealing with results presented at the conference. Finally, there is a discussion of current problems on group actions and an acknowledgment of the work and influence of D. Montgomery on the subject.

The theory of transformation groups studies symmetries of various mathematical objects such as topological spaces, manifolds, polyhedra and function spaces. It is thus a central concept in many branches of mathematics. This volume contains 25 of the papers submitted at the conference on transformation groups held at the University of Newcastle upon Tyne in August 1976.

This book provides an overview of some of the most active topics in the theory of transformation groups over the past decades and stresses advances obtained in the last dozen years. The emphasis is on actions of Lie groups on manifolds and CW complexes. Manifolds and actions of Lie groups on them are studied in the linear, semialgebraic, definable, analytic, smooth, and topological categories. Equivalent vector bundles play an important role. The work is divided into fifteen articles and will be of interest to anyone researching or studying transformations groups. The references make it easy to find details and original accounts of the topics surveyed, including tools and theories used in these accounts.