Ideas of projective geometry keep reappearing in seemingly unrelated fields of mathematics. This book provides a rapid route for graduate students and researchers to contemplate the frontiers of contemporary research in this classic subject. The authors include exercises and historical and cultural comments relating the basic ideas to a broader context.

The orbit method influenced the development of several areas of mathematics in the second half of the 20th century and remains a useful and powerful tool in such areas as Lie theory, representation theory, integrable systems, complex geometry, and mathematical physics. Among the distinguished names associated with the orbit method is that of A.A. Kirillov, whose pioneering paper on nilpotent orbits (1962), places him as the founder of orbit theory. The original research papers in this volume are written by prominent mathematicians and reflect recent achievements in orbit theory and other...