Singularities

French and Japanese mathematicians were responsible for founding and articulating singularity theory, so Franco-Japanese Symposia on Singularities have been held occasionally since 1998. The 19 papers here are from the fourth, held in Toyama, Japan, during August 2007 and from a workshop on singularities held in Niigata just before that. All the papers have been refereed, and none will be published elsewhere. The topics include the Fatou-Julia decomposition of transversally holomorphic foliations of complex codimension one, a plane sextic with finite fundamental group, the topology of abelian pencils on curves, the middle Betti number of certain singularities with critical locus a hyperplane, standard bases and algebraic local cohomology for zero dimensional ideals, and a universal bivariant theory and cobordism groups. No index is provided. Distributed in the US by the American Mathematical Society. Annotation c2010 Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com)