No label defined (Q4540544)

This book is a collection of eight essays about areas of geometry and topology. The essays were written by students of Brian Steer for his sixtieth birthday. They are intended to be accessible to graduate students and to inspire them as these students were inspired by Brian. ``A topologist's view of perfect and acyclic groups'' by \textit{A. J. Berrick} discusses perfect groups (equal to their commutator subgroups) and acyclic groups \((H_i(G)=0\) for \(i\geq 1)\). Perfect groups are seen to arise in algebra, in geometry as fundamental groups, and in algebraic topology. Examples, basic facts, and some open questions are discussed. For the more specialized acyclic groups a wide range of examples are discussed. ``The geometry of the word problem'' by \textit{Martin R. Bridson} discusses the Dehn function of a finite presentation of a group and its rate of growth. For a presentation \(\delta_p (n)=r\) if every word of length \(\leq n\) which is the unit in the group is expressible as a product of at most \(r\) relations. The rate of growth depends only on the group. For a Riemannian manifold one lets \(\text{Fill} (l)=\alpha\) if every null-homotopic loop of length \(\leq l\) bounds a disc of area at most \(\alpha\). The main result is that this function has the same rate of growth as the function for a presentation of the fundamental group. A lot of information is given about the groups with a given rate of growth. ``The Fuller index'' by \textit{M. C. Crabb} and \textit{A. J. B. Potter} discusses an invariant which counts the periodic orbits of differentiable flows. The paper explains the construction of this index. ``The Borel-Weil theorem for complex projective space'' by \textit{Michael Eastwood} and \textit{Justin Sawon} discusses the classification of the irreducible finite dimensional holomorphic representations of the complex general linear group. The result is that every such representation of \(\text{GL} (n+1,C)\) is realized on the space of holomorphic sections of a vector bundle over \(\mathbb{C} P^n\). ``Morse theory in the 1990s'' by \textit{Martin A. Guest} is a discussion of the current approach to Morse theory. Beginning with classical Morse theory it moves to Morse-Bott theory allowing non-degenerate critical submanifolds and the equivariant theory. It ends by discussing Witten's approach in which the Morse function gives a complex from which homology may be computed. ``The Dirac operator'' by \textit{Nigel Hitchin}. This paper studies the null space of the Dirac operator on a general Spin manifold and then applies this to dimensions less than or equal to 4. ``Hermitian geometry'' by \textit{Simon M. Salamon} describes the geometry of complex structures on a Riemannian manifold. ``Indices of vector fields and Chern classes for singular varieties'' by \textit{José Seade} discusses the approaches to defining Chern classes for singular complex varieties which are not manifolds.