The specially commissioned essays collected in this volume reflect the full range of Raymond Williams's interests and concentrate not only on the exposition and evaluation of his ideas, but also on how they have influenced teachers, writers, and other thinkers.

The recent introduction of the Seiberg-Witten invariants of smooth four-manifolds has revolutionized the study of those manifolds. The invariants are gauge-theoretic in nature and are close cousins of the much-studied SU(2)-invariants defined over fifteen years ago by Donaldson. On a practical level, the new invariants have proved to be more powerful and have led to a vast generalization of earlier results. This book is an introduction to the Seiberg-Witten invariants.

The work begins with a review of the classical material on Spin c structures and their associated Dirac...

This book applies the recent techniques of gauge theory to study the smooth classification of compact complex surfaces. The study is divided into four main areas: Classical complex surface theory, gauge theory and Donaldson invariants, deformations of holomorphic vector bundles, and explicit calculations for elliptic sur faces. The book represents a marriage of the techniques of algebraic geometry and 4-manifold topology and gives a detailed exposition of some of the main themes in this very active area of current research.

This book is about the smooth classification of a certainclass of algebraicsurfaces, namely regular ellipticsurfaces of geometric genus one, i.e. elliptic surfaces withb1 = 0 and b2+ = 3. The authors give a completeclassification of these surfaces up to diffeomorphism. Theyachieve this result by partially computing one of Donalson'spolynomial invariants. The computation is carried out usingtechniques from algebraic geometry. In these computationsboth thebasic facts about the Donaldson invariants and therelationship of the moduli space of ASD connections with themoduli space of stable bundles...

Smooth Four-Manifolds and Complex Surfaces