The main theme of this book is the homotopy principle for holomorphic mappings from Stein manifolds to the newly introduced class of Oka manifolds. The book contains the first complete account of Oka-Grauert theory and its modern extensions, initiated by Mikhail Gromov and developed in the last decade by the author and his collaborators. Included is the first systematic presentation of the theory of holomorphic automorphisms of complex Euclidean spaces, a survey on Stein neighborhoods, connections between the geometry of Stein surfaces and Seiberg-Witten theory, and a wide variety of applications ranging from classical to contemporary.

Autorentext

Franc Forstneric has published close to eighty research and survey papers in complex analysis and geometry, including several in leading mathematical journals such as the Annals of Math., Acta Math., Inventiones Math., Duke Math. J., Amer. J. Math., Math. Ann., and others.

He held long term teaching and research positions at the

University of Wisconsin-Madison (Madison, USA),

Institut Mittag-Leffler (Stockholm, Sweden),

Max Planck Institute (Bonn, Germany),

as well as visiting positions at more than ten other institutions. He was an invited speaker at over 70 international conferences and workshops.

Since 2000 he is a Professor of Mathematics at the University of Ljubljana and is a member of the Academy of Sciences of the Republic of Slovenia

Inhalt
Preliminaries. - Stein Manifolds. - Stein Neighborhoods and Holomorphic Approximation. - Automorphisms of Complex Euclidean Spaces. - Oka Manifolds. - Elliptic Complex Geometry and Oka Principle. - Applications. - Embeddings, Immersions and Submersions.- Topological Methods in Stein Geometry. - References. - Index.