The seminar Symplectic Geometry at the University of Berne in summer 1992 showed that the topic of this book is a very active field, where many different branches of mathematics come tog9ther: differential geometry, topology, partial differential equations, variational calculus, and complex analysis. As usual in such a situation, it may be tedious to collect all the necessary ingredients. The present book is intended to give the nonspecialist a solid introduction to the recent developments in symplectic and contact geometry. Chapter 1 gives a review of the symplectic group Sp(n, R), sympkctic...