Kirjahaku

'Motives' were introduced in the mid-1960s by Grothendieck to explain the analogies among the various cohomology theories for algebraic varieties, to play the role of the missing rational cohomology, and to provide a blueprint for proving Weil's conjectures about the zeta function of a variety over a finite field. Over the last ten years or so, researchers in various areas - Hodge theory, algebraic $K$-theory, polylogarithms, automorphic forms, $L$-functions, $\ell$-adic representations, trigonometric sums, and algebraic cycles - have discovered that an enlarged (and in part conjectural) theory of 'mixed' motives indicates and explains phenomena appearing in each area.Thus the theory holds the potential of enriching and unifying these areas. This is one of two volumes containing the revised texts of nearly all the lectures presented at the AMS-IMS-SIAM Joint Summer Research Conference on Motives, held in Seattle, in 1991. A number of related works are also included, making for a total of forty-seven papers, from general introductions to specialized surveys to research papers.

The relations that could or should exist between algebraic cycles, algebraic K-theory, and the cohomology of - possibly singular - varieties, are the topic of investigation of this book. The author proceeds in an axiomatic way, combining the concepts of twisted Poincaré duality theories, weights, and tensor categories. One thus arrives at generalizations to arbitrary varieties of the Hodge and Tate conjectures to explicit conjectures on l-adic Chern characters for global fields and to certain counterexamples for more general fields. It is to be hoped that these relations ions will in due course be explained by a suitable tensor category of mixed motives. An approximation to this is constructed in the setting of absolute Hodge cycles, by extending this theory to arbitrary varieties. The book can serve both as a guide for the researcher, and as an introduction to these ideas for the non-expert, provided (s)he knows or is willing to learn about K-theory and the standard cohomology theories of algebraic varieties.

This book provides a rigorous and self-contained review of desingularization theory. Focusing on arbitrary dimensional schemes, it discusses the important concepts in full generality, complete with proofs, and includes an introduction to the basis of Hironaka’s Theory. The core of the book is a complete proof of desingularization of surfaces; despite being well-known, this result was no more than folklore for many years, with no existing references. Throughout the book there are numerous computations on standard bases, blowing ups and characteristic polyhedra, which will be a source of inspiration for experts exploring bigger dimensions. Beginners will also benefit from a section which presents some easily overlooked pathologies.