These volumes are based on lecture courses and seminars given at the LMS Durham Symposium on the geometry of low-dimensional manifolds. This area has been one of intense research recently, with major breakthroughs that have illuminated the way a number of different subjects (topology, differential and algebraic geometry and mathematical physics) interact.

These volumes are based on lecture courses and seminars given at the LMS Durham Symposium on the geometry of low-dimensional manifolds. This area has been one of intense research recently, with major breakthroughs that have illuminated the way a number of different subjects (topology, differential and algebraic geometry and mathematical physics) interact.

This invaluable monograph has arisen in part from E Witten's lectures on topological quantum field theory in the spring of 1989 at Princeton University. At that time Witten unified several important mathematical works in terms of quantum field theory, most notably the Donaldson polynomial, the Gromov-Floer homology and the Jones polynomials.In his lectures, among other things, Witten explained his intrinsic three-dimensional construction of Jones polynomials via Chern-Simons gauge theory. He provided both a rigorous proof of the geometric quantization of the Chern-Simons action and a very illuminating view as to how the quantization arises from quantization of the space of connections. He constructed a projective flat connection for the Hilbert space bundle over the space of complex structures, which becomes the Knizhik-Zamolodchikov equations in a special case. His construction leads to many beautiful applications, such as the derivation of the skein relation and the surgery formula for knot invariant, a proof of Verlinde's formula, and the establishment of a connection with conformal field theory.In this book, Sen Hu has added material to provide some of the details left out of Witten's lectures and to update some new developments. In Chapter 4 he presents a construction of knot invariant via representation of mapping class groups based on the work of Moore-Seiberg and Kohno. In Chapter 6 he offers an approach to constructing knot invariant from string theory and topological sigma models proposed by Witten and Vafa. The localization principle is a powerful tool to build mathematical foundations for such cohomological quantum field theories.In addition, some highly relevant material by S S Chern and E Witten has been included as appendices for the convenience of readers: (1) Complex Manifold without Potential Theory by S S Chern, pp148-154. (2) “Geometric quantization of Chern-Simons gauge theory” by S Axelrod, S D Pietra and E Witten. (3) “On holomorphic factorization of WZW and Coset models” by E Witten.

This book contains expository papers that give an up-to-date account of recent developments and open problems in the geometry and topology of manifolds, along with several research articles that present new results appearing in published form for the first time. The unifying theme is the problem of understanding manifolds in low dimensions, notably in dimensions three and four, and the techniques include algebraic topology, surgery theory, Donaldson and Seiberg-Witten gauge theory, Heegaard Floer homology, contact and symplectic geometry, and Gromov-Witten invariants. The articles collected for this volume were contributed by participants of the Conference "Geometry and Topology of Manifolds" held at McMaster University on May 14-18, 2004 and are representative of the many excellent talks delivered at the conference.

These notes deal with an area that lies at the crossroads of mathematics and physics and rest primarily on the pioneering work of Vaughan Jones and Edward Witten, who related polynomial invariants of knots to a topological quantum field theory in 2+1 dimensions.