Coverage includes foundational material as well as current research, authored by top specialists within their fields.

"Contains papers presented at the 35th Taniguchi International Symposium held recently in Sanda and Kyoto, Japan. Details the latest developments concerning moduli spaces of vector bundles or instantons and their application. Covers a broad array of topics in both differential and algebraic geometry."

Geometric Invariant Theory (GIT), developed in the 1960s by David Mumford, is the theory of quotients by group actions in Algebraic Geometry. Its principal application is to the construction of various moduli spaces. Peter Newstead gave a series of lectures in 1975 at the Tata Institute of Fundamental Research, Mumbai on GIT and its application to the moduli of vector bundles on curves. It was a masterful yet easy to follow exposition of important material, with clear proofs and many examples. The notes, published as a volume in the TIFR lecture notes series, became a classic, and generations of algebraic geometers working in these subjects got their basic introduction to this area through these lecture notes. Though continuously in demand, these lecture notes have been out of print for many years. The Tata Institute is happy to re-issue these notes in a new print.

This edition has been updated to reflect recent advances in the theory of semistable coherent sheaves and their moduli spaces. The authors review changes in the field and point the reader towards further literature. An ideal text for graduate students or mathematicians with a background in algebraic geometry.

Holomorphic vector bundles have become objects of interest not only to algebraic and differential geometers and complex analysts but also to low dimensional topologists and mathematical physicists working on gauge theory. This book, which grew out of the author's lectures and seminars in Berkeley and Japan, is written for researchers and graduate students in these various fields of mathematics. Originally published in 1987. The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.

A novel feature of the book is its integrated approach to algebraic surface theory and the study of vector bundle theory on both curves and surfaces. While the two subjects remain separate through the first few chapters, they become much more tightly interconnected as the book progresses. Thus vector bundles over curves are studied to understand ruled surfaces, and then reappear in the proof of Bogomolov's inequality for stable bundles, which is itself applied to study canonical embeddings of surfaces via Reider's method. Similarly, ruled and elliptic surfaces are discussed in detail, before the geometry of vector bundles over such surfaces is analysed. Many of the results on vector bundles appear for the first time in book form, backed by many examples, both of surfaces and vector bundles, and over 100 exercises forming an integral part of the text. Aimed at graduates with a thorough first-year course in algebraic geometry, as well as more advanced students and researchers in the areas of algebraic geometry, gauge theory, or 4-manifold topology, many of the results on vector bundles will also be of interest to physicists studying string theory.

This book is a collection of survey articles by the main speakers at the 1993 Durham symposium on vector bundles in algebraic geometry.