This book provides an introduction to symplectic field theory, a new and important subject which is currently being developed. The starting point of this theory are compactness results for holomorphic curves established in the last decade. The author presents a systematic introduction providing a lot of background material, much of which is scattered throughout the literature. Since the content grew out of lectures given by the author, the main aim is to provide an entry point into symplectic field theory for non-specialists and for graduate students. Extensions of certain compactness results, which are believed to be true by the specialists but have not yet been published in the literature in detail, top off the scope of this monograph.

This book is an introduction to modern methods of symplectic topology. It is devoted to explaining the solution of an important problem originating from classical mechanics: the 'Arnold conjecture', which asserts that the number of 1-periodic trajectories of a non-degenerate Hamiltonian system is bounded below by the dimension of the homology of the underlying manifold.

This updated and revised third edition of the leading reference volume on distance metrics includes new items from very active research areas in the use of distances and metrics such as geometry, graph theory, probability theory and analysis. Among the new topics included are, for example, polyhedral metric space, nearness matrix problems, distances between belief assignments, distance-related animal settings, diamond-cutting distances, natural units of length, Heidegger’s de-severance distance, and brain distances.