The last ten years have seen rapid advances in the understanding of differentiable four-manifolds, not least of which has been the discovery of new 'exotic' manifolds. These results have had far-reaching consequences in geometry, topology, and mathematical physics, and have proven to be a mainspring of current mathematical research. This book provides a lucid and accessible account of the modern study of the geometry of four-manifolds. Consequently, it will be required reading for all those mathematicians and theoretical physicists whose research touches on this topic. The authors present...
The last ten years have seen rapid advances in the understanding of differentiable four-manifolds, not least of which has been the discovery of new 'e...