Vector Bundles

The book is devoted to the basic notions of vector bundles and their applications. The focus of attention is towards explaining the most important notions and geometric constructions connected with the theory of vector bundles. Theorems are not always formulated in maximal generality but rather in such a way that the geometric nature of the objects comes to the fore. Whenever possible examples are given to illustrate the role of vector bundles. Audience: With numerous illustrations and applications to various problems in mathematics and the sciences, the book will be of interest to a range of graduate students from pure and applied mathematics.

A novel feature of the book is its integrated approach to algebraic surface theory and the study of vector bundle theory on both curves and surfaces. While the two subjects remain separate through the first few chapters, they become much more tightly interconnected as the book progresses. Thus vector bundles over curves are studied to understand ruled surfaces, and then reappear in the proof of Bogomolov's inequality for stable bundles, which is itself applied to study canonical embeddings of surfaces via Reider's method. Similarly, ruled and elliptic surfaces are discussed in detail, before the geometry of vector bundles over such surfaces is analysed. Many of the results on vector bundles appear for the first time in book form, backed by many examples, both of surfaces and vector bundles, and over 100 exercises forming an integral part of the text. Aimed at graduates with a thorough first-year course in algebraic geometry, as well as more advanced students and researchers in the areas of algebraic geometry, gauge theory, or 4-manifold topology, many of the results on vector bundles will also be of interest to physicists studying string theory.

The theory of characteristic classes provides a meeting ground for the various disciplines of differential topology, differential and algebraic geometry, cohomology, and fiber bundle theory. As such, it is a fundamental and an essential tool in the study of differentiable manifolds. In this volume, the authors provide a thorough introduction to characteristic classes, with detailed studies of Stiefel-Whitney classes, Chern classes, Pontrjagin classes, and the Euler class. Three appendices cover the basics of cohomology theory and the differential forms approach to characteristic classes, and provide an account of Bernoulli numbers. Based on lecture notes of John Milnor, which first appeared at Princeton University in 1957 and have been widely studied by graduate students of topology ever since, this published version has been completely revised and corrected.

Vector Bundles - Vol 1

Holomorphic vector bundles have become objects of interest not only to algebraic and differential geometers and complex analysts but also to low dimensional topologists and mathematical physicists working on gauge theory. This book, which grew out of the author's lectures and seminars in Berkeley and Japan, is written for researchers and graduate students in these various fields of mathematics. Originally published in 1987. 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.

These lecture notes are intended as an introduction to the methods of classification of holomorphic vector bundles over projective algebraic manifolds X. To be as concrete as possible we have mostly restricted ourselves to the case X = Fn. According to Serre (GAGA) the classification of holomorphic vector bundles is equivalent to the classification of algebraic vector bundles. Here we have used almost exclusively the language of analytic geometry. The book is intended for students who have a basic knowledge of analytic and (or) algebraic geometry. Some funda mental results from these fields are summarized at the beginning. One of the authors gave a survey in the Seminaire Bourbaki 1978 on the current state of the classification of holomorphic vector bundles overFn. This lecture then served as the basis for a course of lectures in Gottingen in the Winter Semester 78/79. The present work is an extended and up-dated exposition of that course. Because of the introductory nature of this book we have had to leave out some difficult topics such as the restriction theorem of Barth. As compensation we have appended to each sec tion a paragraph in which historical remarks are made, further results indicated and unsolved problems presented. The book is divided into two chapters. Each chapter is subdivided into several sections which in turn are made up of a number of paragraphs. Each section is preceeded by a short description of iv its contents.

This book is a collection of survey articles by the main speakers at the 1993 Durham symposium on vector bundles in algebraic geometry.

The central theme of this book is an exposition of the geometric technique of calculating syzygies. It is written from a point of view of commutative algebra, and without assuming any knowledge of representation theory the calculation of syzygies of determinantal varieties is explained. The starting point is a definition of Schur functors, and these are discussed from both an algebraic and geometric point of view. Then a chapter on various versions of Bott's Theorem leads on to a careful explanation of the technique itself, based on a description of the direct image of a Koszul complex. Applications to determinantal varieties follow, plus there are also chapters on applications of the technique to rank varieties for symmetric and skew symmetric tensors of arbitrary degree, closures of conjugacy classes of nilpotent matrices, discriminants and resultants. Numerous exercises are included to give the reader insight into how to apply this important method.