Torus Actions on Symplectic Manifolds

by Michèle Audin

This is an extended second edition of "The Topology of Torus Actions on Symplectic Manifolds" published in this series in 1991. The material and references have been updated. Symplectic manifolds and torus actions are investigated, with numerous examples of torus actions, for instance on some moduli spaces. Although the book is still centered on convexity theorems, it contains much more results, proofs and examples.
Chapter I deals with Lie group actions on manifolds. In Chapters II and III, symplectic geometry and Hamiltonian group actions are introduced, especially torus actions and action-angle variables. The core of the book is Chapter IV which is devoted to applications of Morse theory to Hamiltonian group actions, including convexity theorems. As a family of examples of symplectic manifolds, moduli spaces of flat connections are discussed in Chapter V. Then, Chapter VI centers on the Duistermaat-Heckman theorem. In Chapter VII, a topological construction of complex toric varieties is presented, and the last chapter illustrates the introduced methods for Hamiltonian circle actions on 4-manifolds.

192 pages, Hardcover

First published May 1, 1991

About the author

Michèle Audin is a French mathematician, and a professor at l'Institut de recherche mathématique avancée (IRMA) in Strasbourg, where she does research notably in the area of symplectic geometry.

Born in 1954, she is a former student of l'École normale supérieure de jeunes filles within the École normale supérieure Sèvres. She became a member of l'Oulipo in 2009.

She is the daughter of mathematician Maurice Audin, who died under torture in 1957 in Algeria, after having been arrested by parachutists of General Jacques Massu. On January 1, 2009, she refused to receive the Legion of Honour, on the grounds that the President of France, Nicolas Sarkozy, had refused to respond to a letter written by her mother regarding the disappearance of her father.

(from Wikipedia)