The theory of surfaces has reached a certain stage of completeness and major efforts concentrate on solving concrete questions rather than further developing the formal theory. Many of these questions are touched on in this classic volume: such as the classification of quartic surfaces, the description of moduli spaces for abelian surfaces, and the automorphism group of a Kummer surface. First printed in 1905 after the untimely death of the author, this work has stood for most of this century as one of the classic reference works in geometry.

Contents: Introduction. - Standard Notations. - Preliminaries. - Curves on Surfaces. - Mappings of Surfaces. - Some General Properties of Surfaces. - Examples. - The Enriques-Kodaira Classification. - Surfaces of General Type. - K3-Surfaces and Enriques Surfaces. - Bibliography. - Subject Index.

In the 19 years which passed since the first edition was published, several important developments have taken place in the theory of surfaces. The most sensational one concerns the differentiable structure of surfaces. Twenty years ago very little was known about differentiable structures on 4-manifolds, but in the meantime Donaldson on the one hand and Seiberg and Witten on the other hand, have found, inspired by gauge theory, totally new invariants. Strikingly, together with the theory explained in this book these invariants yield a wealth of new results about the differentiable structure...