The discoveries of the past decade have opened new perspectives for the old field of Hamiltonian systems and led to the creation of a new field: symplectic topology. Surprising rigidity phenomena demonstrate that the nature of symplectic map pings is very different from that of volume preserving mappings which raised new questions, many of them still unanswered. On the other hand, due to the analysis of an old variational principle in classical mechanics, global periodic phenomena in Hamiltonian systems have been established. As it turns out, these seemingly differ ent phenomena are mysteriously related. One of the links is a class of symplectic invariants, called symplectic capacities. These invariants are the main theme of this book which grew out of lectures given by the authors at Rutgers University, the RUB Bochum and at the ETH Zurich (1991) and also at the Borel Seminar in Bern 1992. Since the lectures did not require any previous knowledge, only a few and rather elementary topics were selected and proved in detail. Moreover, our se lection has been prompted by a single principle: the action principle of mechanics. The action functional for loops in the phase space, given by 1 Fh) = J pdq -J H(t, 'Y(t)) dt , 'Y 0 differs from the old Hamiltonian principle in the configuration space defined by a Lagrangian. The critical points of F are those loops 'Y which solve the Hamiltonian equations associated with the Hamiltonian H and hence are the periodic orbits.
The discoveries of the last decades have opened new perspectives for the old field of Hamiltonian systems and led to the creation of a new field: symplectic topology. Surprising rigidity phenomena demonstrate that the nature of symplectic mappings is very different from that of volume preserving mappings. This raises new questions, many of them still unanswered. On the other hand, analysis of an old variational principle in classical mechanics has established global periodic phenomena in Hamiltonian systems. As it turns out, these seemingly different phenomena are mysteriously related. One of the links is a class of symplectic invariants, called symplectic capacities. These invariants are the main theme of this book, which includes such topics as basic symplectic geometry, symplectic capacities and rigidity, periodic orbits for Hamiltonian systems and the action principle, a bi-invariant metric on the symplectic diffeomorphism group and its geometry, symplectic fixed point theory, the Arnold conjectures and first order elliptic systems, and finally a survey on Floer homology and symplectic homology.
The exposition is self-contained and addressed to researchers and students from the graduate level onwards.
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All the chapters have a nice introduction with the historic development of the subject and with a perfect description of the state of the art. The main ideas are brightly exposed throughout the book. (...) This book, written by two experienced researchers, will certainly fill in a gap in the theory of symplectic topology. The authors have taken part in the development of such a theory by themselves or by their collaboration with other outstanding people in the area.
(Zentralblatt MATH)
This book is a beautiful introduction to one outlook on the exciting new developments of the last ten to fifteen years in symplectic geometry, or symplectic topology, as certain aspects of the subject are lately called. (...) The authors are obvious masters of the field, and their reflections here and there throughout the book on the ambient literature and open problems are perhaps the most interesting parts of the volume.
(Matematica)
