Smooth Compactifications of Locally Symmetric Varieties

The new edition of this celebrated and long-unavailable book preserves much of the content and structure of the original, which is still unrivaled in its presentation of a universal method for the resolution of a class of singularities in algebraic geometry. At the same time, the book has been completely retypeset, errors have been eliminated, proofs have been streamlined, the notation has been made consistent and uniform, an index has been added, and a guide to recent literature has been added. The authors begin by reviewing key results in the theory of toroidal embeddings and by explaining examples that illustrate the theory. Chapter II develops the theory of open self-adjoint homogeneous cones and their polyhedral reduction theory. Chapter III is devoted to basic facts on hermitian symmetric domains and culminates in the construction of toroidal compactifications of their quotients by an arithmetic group. The final chapter considers several applications of the general results. The book brings together ideas from algebraic geometry, differential geometry, representation theory and number theory, and will continue to prove of value for researchers and graduate students in these areas.

Avner Ash is Professor in the Department of Mathematics at Boston College, Massachusetts.

David Mumford is Professor Emeritus of Applied Mathematics at Brown University, Rhode Island.

Michael Rapoport is Professor in the Mathematical Institute of the University of Bonn, Germany.

Yung-sheng Tai is Associate Professor of Mathematics at Haverford College, Pennsylvania.