Singularities of differentiable maps, Volume 2. Monodromy and asymptotics of integrals. Transl. from the Russian by Hugh Porteous and revised by the authors and James Montaldi (Q417403): Difference between revisions

This is the second volume of the reprint of the 1988 English translation of the monograph ``Singularities of differentiable maps'' [Zbl 0659.58002], published first in Russian in 1984 [Zbl 0545.58001]. It contains a huge amount of material on the structure of singularities, and it is more or less the state of the art up to around 1985, from the point of view of Arnold's famous school. This monograph is still currently cited in many research articles. The first part presents the topological structure of isolated singularities of complex functions: vanishing cycles, monodromy, the variation map, Picard-Lefschetz theory, distinguished bases, intersection form, Seifert form, Dynkin diagram etc. The last chapter extends the discussion to boundary singularities, complete intersections with isolated singularities and singularities of projections onto a line. The second part the volume presents asymptotic oscillatory integrals, starting by examples and the introduction of the results. Among the discussed topics are: the oscillation index, the singularity index and their computations in terms of resolution of singularities and of Newton polyhedra. The last part of the monograph studies integrals of holomorphic forms over vanishing cycles. As the cycles turn around the singularity, the behaviour of these integrals reflect properties of the monodromy operator and are closely related to the mixed Hodge structure on the vanishing cohomology; the spectrum of the singularity comes naturally into the picture. The details of the proofs are referred to the appropriate literature of the time. This actually increased tremendously after 1985 in various directions giving rise to new branches such as ``mixed Hodge modules'' and ``motivic Milnor fibre''.