Alexander Tumanov

The musical career of Alexander Tumanov extends from Stalinist and Soviet Russia through contemporary Canada, and as such provides an inspiring portrait of one person's devotion to his art under trying circumstances. Tumanov was a founding member of Moscow's Madrigal Ensemble of early music, which introduced Renaissance and Baroque music to the Soviet Union. The Ensemble enjoyed tremendous popularity in the 1960s and 1970s, despite occasional official disapproval by the Soviet bureaucracy. At times the compositions of the group's founder, Andrei Volkonsky, were banned. Volkonsky eventually emigrated to escape the oppressive conditions, followed soon after, in 1974, by Tumanov, and the Madrigal Ensemble continued in a changed form under new leaders. The story of the author's subsequent life and career in Canada provides a poignant point of contrast with his Soviet period — at the musical, academic, and political levels. This book is a valuable resource for those interested in the history of music and intellectual life in Russia, Ukraine, and the Soviet Union in the twentieth century and is the first published book on the Madrigal Ensemble.

The geometry of real submanifolds in complex manifolds and the analysis of their mappings belong to the most advanced streams of contemporary Mathematics. In this area converge the techniques of various and sophisticated mathematical fields such as P.D.E.s, boundary value problems, induced equations, analytic discs in symplectic spaces, complex dynamics. For the variety of themes and the surprisingly good interplaying of different research tools, these problems attracted the attention of some among the best mathematicians of these latest two decades. They also entered as a refined content of an advanced education. In this sense the five lectures of this volume provide an excellent cultural background while giving very deep insights of current research activity.

This book contains the notes of five short courses delivered at the "Centro Internazionale Matematico Estivo" session "Integral Geometry, Radon Transforms and Complex Analysis" held in Venice (Italy) in June 1996: three of them deal with various aspects of integral geometry, with a common emphasis on several kinds of Radon transforms, their properties and applications, the other two share a stress on CR manifolds and related problems. All lectures are accessible to a wide audience, and provide self-contained introductions and short surveys on the subjects, as well as detailed expositions of selected results.