The famous problems of squaring the circle, doubling the cube and trisecting an angle captured the imagination of both professional and amateur mathematicians for over two thousand years. Despite the enormous effort and ingenious attempts by these men and women, the problems would not yield to purely geometrical methods. It was only the development. of abstract algebra in the nineteenth century which enabled mathematicians to arrive at the surprising conclusion that these constructions are not possible. In this book we develop enough abstract algebra to prove that these constructions are impossible. Our approach introduces all the relevant concepts about fields ..

Following the tremendous reception of our first volume on topological groups called "Topological Groups: Yesterday, Today, and Tomorrow", we now present our second volume. Like the first volume, this collection contains articles by some of the best scholars in the world on topological groups. A feature of the first volume was surveys, and we continue that tradition in this volume with three new surveys. These surveys are of interest not only to the expert but also to those who are less experienced. Particularly exciting to active researchers, especially young researchers, is the inclusion of over three dozen open questions. This volume consists of 11 papers cont ..

These lecture notes begin with an introduction to topological groups and proceed to a proof of the important Pontryagin-van Kampen duality theorem and a detailed exposition of the structure of locally compact abelian groups. Measure theory and Banach algebra are entirely avoided and only a small amount of group theory and topology is required, dealing with the subject in an elementary fashion. With about a hundred exercises for the student, it is a suitable text for first-year graduate courses. ..

In 1900, David Hilbert asked whether each locally euclidean topological group admits a Lie group structure. This was the fifth of his famous 23 questions which foreshadowed much of the mathematical creativity of the twentieth century. It required half a century of effort by several generations of eminent mathematicians until it was settled in the affirmative. These efforts resulted over time in the Peter-Weyl Theorem, the Pontryagin-van Kampen Duality Theorem for locally compact abelian groups, and finally the solution of Hilbert 5 and the structure theory of locally compact groups, through the combined work of Andrew Gleason, Kenkichi Iwasawa, Deane Montgomery, ..