In the fall semester of 1979 I gave a course on deformation theory at Berkeley. My goal was to understand completely Grothendieck's local study of the Hilbert scheme using the cohomology of the normal bundle to characterize the Zariski tangent space and the obstructions to deformations. At the same timeIstartedwritinglecturenotesforthecourse.However, thewritingproject soon foundered as the subject became more intricate, and the result was no more than ?ve of a projected thirteen sections, corresponding roughly to s- tions 1, 2, 3, 5, 6 of the present book. These handwritten notes circulated...

In recent years, I have been teaching a junior-senior-level course on the classi- cal geometries. This book has grown out of that teaching experience. I assume only high-school geometry and some abstract algebra. The course begins in Chapter 1 with a critical examination of Euclid's Elements. Students are expected to read concurrently Books I-IV of Euclid's text, which must be obtained sepa- rately. The remainder of the book is an exploration of questions that arise natu- rally from this reading, together with their modern answers. To shore up the foundations we use Hilbert's axioms. The...

In the fall semester of 1979 I gave a course on deformation theory at Berkeley. My goal was to understand completely Grothendieck's local study of the Hilbert scheme using the cohomology of the normal bundle to characterize the Zariski tangent space and the obstructions to deformations. At the same timeIstartedwritinglecturenotesforthecourse.However, thewritingproject soon foundered as the subject became more intricate, and the result was no more than ?ve of a projected thirteen sections, corresponding roughly to s- tions 1, 2, 3, 5, 6 of the present book. These handwritten notes circulated...