Autorentext

Biography Alexandru Dimca Alexandru Dimca obtained his PhD in 1981 from the University of Bucharest. His field of interest is the topology of algebraic varieties, singularities of spaces and maps, Hodge theory and D-modules. Dimca has been a visiting member of the Max Planck Institute in Bonn and the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton. He is the author of three monographs and over 60 research papers published in math journals all over the world. Dimca has extensively taught at universities in Romania, Australia, the USA, and France, and he uses this teaching experience to convey effectively, to a wider mathematical community, the abstract and difficult ideas of algebraic topology.

Inhalt
1 Whitney Stratifications.- 1. Some Motivations and Basic Definitions.- 2. Topological Triviality and ?*-Constant Deformations.- 3. The First Thom Isotopy Lemma.- 4. On the Topology of Affine Hypersurfaces.- 5. Links and Conic Structures.- 6. On Zariski Theorems of Lefschetz Type.- 2 Links of Curve and Surface Singularities.- 1. A Quick Trip into Classical Knot Theory.- 2. Links of Plane Curve Singularities.- 3. Links of Surface Singularities.- 4. Special Classes of Surface Singularities.- 3 The Milnor Fibration and the Milnor Lattice.- 1. The Milnor Fibration.- 2. The Connectivity of the Link, of the Milnor Fiber, and of Its Boundary.- 3. Vanishing Cycles and the Intersection Form.- 4. Homology Spheres, Exotic Spheres, and the Casson Invariant.- 4 Fundamental Groups of Hypersurface Complements.- 1. Some General Results.- 2. Presentations of Groups and Monodromy Relations.- 3. The van Kampen-Zariski Theorem.- 4. Two Classical Examples.- 5 Projective Complete Intersections.- 1. Topology of the Projective Space Pn.- 2. Topology of Complete Intersections.- 3. Smooth Complete Intersections.- 4. Complete Intersections with Isolated Singularities.- 6 de Rham Cohomology of Hypersurface Complements.- 1. Differential Forms on Hypersurface Complements.- 2. Spectral Sequences and Koszul Complexes.- 3. Singularities with a One-Dimensional Critical Locus.- 4. Alexander Polynomials and Defects of Linear Systems.- Appendix A Integral Bilinear Forms and Dynkin Diagrams.- Appendix B Weighted Projective Varieties.- Appendix C Mixed Hodge Structures.- References.