Stable Mappings And Their Singularities

This book aims to present to first and second year graduate students a beautiful and relatively accessible field of mathematics-the theory of singu larities of stable differentiable mappings. The study of stable singularities is based on the now classical theories of Hassler Whitney, who determined the generic singularities (or lack of them) of Rn ~ Rm (m ~ 2n - 1) and R2 ~ R2, and Marston Morse, for mappings who studied these singularities for Rn ~ R. It was Rene Thorn who noticed (in the late '50's) that all of these results could be incorporated into one theory. The 1960 Bonn notes of Thom and Harold Levine (reprinted in [42]) gave the first general exposition of this theory. However, these notes preceded the work of Bernard Malgrange [23] on what is now known as the Malgrange Preparation Theorem-which allows the relatively easy computation of normal forms of stable singularities as well as the proof of the main theorem in the subject-and the definitive work of John Mather. More recently, two survey articles have appeared, by Arnold [4] and Wall [53], which have done much to codify the new material; still there is no totally accessible description of this subject for the beginning student. We hope that these notes will partially fill this gap. In writing this manuscript, we have repeatedly cribbed from the sources mentioned above-in particular, the Thom-Levine notes and the six basic papers by Mather.

This book aims to present to first and second year graduate students a beautiful and relatively accessible field of mathematics-the theory of singu larities of stable differentiable mappings. The study of stable singularities is based on the now classical theories of Hassler Whitney, who determined the generic singularities (or lack of them) of Rn ~ Rm (m ~ 2n - 1) and R2 ~ R2, and Marston Morse, for mappings who studied these singularities for Rn ~ R. It was Rene Thorn who noticed (in the late '50's) that all of these results could be incorporated into one theory. The 1960 Bonn notes of Thom and Harold Levine (reprinted in [42]) gave the first general exposition of this theory. However, these notes preceded the work of Bernard Malgrange [23] on what is now known as the Malgrange Preparation Theorem-which allows the relatively easy computation of normal forms of stable singularities as well as the proof of the main theorem in the subject-and the definitive work of John Mather. More recently, two survey articles have appeared, by Arnold [4] and Wall [53], which have done much to codify the new material; still there is no totally accessible description of this subject for the beginning student. We hope that these notes will partially fill this gap. In writing this manuscript, we have repeatedly cribbed from the sources mentioned above-in particular, the Thom-Levine notes and the six basic papers by Mather.

The first monograph on singularities of mappings for many years, this book provides an introduction to the subject and an account of recent developments concerning the local structure of complex analytic mappings. Part I of the book develops the now classical real C∞ and complex analytic theories jointly. Standard topics such as stability, deformation theory and finite determinacy, are covered in this part. In Part II of the book, the authors focus on the complex case. The treatment is centred around the idea of the "nearby stable object" associated to an unstable map-germ, which includes in particular the images and discriminants of stable perturbations of unstable singularities. This part includes recent research results, bringing the reader up to date on the topic. By focusing on singularities of mappings, rather than spaces, this book provides a necessary addition to the literature. Many examples and exercises, as well as appendices on background material, make it an invaluable guide for graduate students and a key reference for researchers. A number of graduate level courses on singularities of mappings could be based on the material it contains.

The modern theory of singularities provides a unifying theme that runs through fields of mathematics as diverse as homological algebra and Hamiltonian systems. It is also an important point of reference in the development of a large part of contemporary algebra, geometry and analysis. Presented by internationally recognized experts, the collection of articles in this volume yields a significant cross-section of these developments. The wide range of surveys includes an authoritative treatment of the deformation theory of isolated complex singularities by prize-winning researcher K Miyajima. Graduate students and even ambitious undergraduates in mathematics will find many research ideas in this volume and non-experts in mathematics can have an overview of some classic and fundamental results in singularity theory. The explanations are detailed enough to capture the interest of the curious reader, and complete enough to provide the necessary background material needed to go further into the subject and explore the research literature.

This text offers a selection of papers on singularity theory presented at the Sixth Workshop on Real and Complex Singularities held at ICMC-USP, Brazil. It should help students and specialists to understand results that illustrate the connections between singularity theory and related fields. The authors discuss irreducible plane curve singularities, openness and multitransversality, the distribution Afs and the real asymptotic spectrum, deformations of boundary singularities and non-crystallographic coxeter groups, transversal Whitney topology and singularities of Haefliger foliations, the topology of hypersurface singularities, polar multiplicities and equisingularity of map germs from C3 to C4, and topological invariants of stable maps from a surface to the plane from a global viewpoint.

The volume develops a thorough theory of singular fibers of generic differentiable maps. This is the first work that establishes the foundational framework of the global study of singular differentiable maps of negative codimension from the viewpoint of differential topology. The book contains not only a general theory, but also some explicit examples together with a number of very concrete applications. This is a very interesting subject in differential topology, since it shows a beautiful interplay between the usual theory of singularities of differentiable maps and the geometric topology of manifolds.